ANOTHER VOICE
People find it embarrassing that this man is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
CHARLES MOORE
n Monday Mr Michael Heseltine told the Today programme that in the 1930s the press had been wrong in calling for appeasement, and therefore the Govern- ment should not pay any attention to press criticism today.
The analogy does not seem terribly strong. In the 1930s, most of the press was supporting the Government's policy of appeasement, which was courageously opposed by between 20 and 40 Tory back- benchers. Today, the press is attacking the Government, and some newspapers are critical of the Maastricht Treaty, which is courageously opposed by between 20 and 40 Tory backbenchers. But the weakness of Mr Heseltine's comparison only helps to make clear what is the Government's one guiding maxim in these difficult times: don't do anything the press recommends.
This rule can be hard to follow. What it tends to mean in practice is that the Gov- ernment does do what the press recom- mends, but only after a painful delay. Thus Mr Major keeps Mr David Mellor because the press says he should go and then sacks him when it has screamed the same mes- sage for a few weeks. Thus Mr Major kept Britain in the Exchange Rate Mechanism long after the press had said that the pound could not be sustained, spent £2 billion defending it in the markets and then pulled out of it after all. And thus Mr Major keeps Norman Lamont.
It might not be a bad rule of thumb. The press generally is wrong, and the more wrong the more unanimous. But one is surely entitled to ask for the Government to have some principles of action of its own. We, the press, are there to react to it, and not the other way round. Anyway, it was not the press which turned the Tories out of the shires, it was the voters.
But I think things will probably go on as they are because this Government is like a woman in a Kingsley Amis novel. It assumes that criticism is the same as mal- ice, an assumption which tends to become self-fulfilling.
The entire debate about the ERM and Maastricht, for example, has been bedev- illed by the idea that anyone who says both are mistaken is 'embittered', and simply wants to bring back Mrs Thatcher. It would not occur to Mr Major that people say those things merely because they believe them to be true. You cannot have a discus- sion with this Government about whether fixed exchange rates are a good idea, or what European Union means, or what should be the future of ex-Yugoslavia, because it does not understand the terms of such a discussion. It responds by saying things like, 'If the rate's fixed, we'll do well out of the Germans,' or 'European Union's just a phrase Kohl insisted on having' or `Yugoslavia's not one we can sell to the punters.' None of those answers is neces- sarily wicked. You have to think about practical things like that in politics. It's just that it's all this Government thinks about.
Its attitude is all disclosed in that phrase `the punters'. If you think of the voter as a man whose face you see only when he pays you money or, more rarely, collects it from you, you have spotted the first but surely not the only thing about politics.
Actually the press is being quite restrained. For what journalists say to one another in private is that Mr Major is abso- lutely no good at all; but they do not put it quite so harshly in print, partly out of resid- ual kindness or fear, and partly because they realise that they may have him around for another four years and so they must keep up the fiction of interest in him. But now they are joined by politicians and by voters. It has reached the stage when peo- ple find it embarrassing that this man is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, just as people feel about Dr Carey being Archbishop of Canterbury. Amid the encircling gloom, I notice the political class turning to the Foreign Secre- tary. What a relief to see someone who is calm and dignified and can string a sen- tence together. Mr Hurd is like what a British Foreign Secretary is supposed to be like, not only because he is tall and distin- guished-looking but because a first-class brain (itself a Foreign Office phrase) lurks behind the intimidating spectacles and sil- very hair. How we all commend his eleg- ance whenever he comes and tells the Commons that what he said about Maas- tricht two weeks ago is now inoperative and that he proposes to do the opposite. Wouldn't it be nice if he were Prime Minister?
I must admit to sharing this weakness, but weakness I think it is. For this Govern- ment is not ruled by Mr Major alone, but by the 'Major-Hurd axis'. This axis first came to prominence, readers will recall, when it succeeded where the Lawson-Howe axis had failed and persuaded Mrs Thatch- er to take us into the ERM. In its first action the axis displayed its whole subse- quent character, being (a) diplomatically skillful; (b) conventionally minded and (c) mistaken.
Since then the axis has gone from strength to strength. The quality of (a) ensured a good negotiation at Maastricht, while the quality of (c) meant that the country has been plunged into 18 months of wrangling. The quality of (b) has pre- vented any reconsideration of errors.
And it really is an axis in that the one could not flourish without the other. Look at the treatment of Denmark. When the Danes voted no to Maastricht the first time Mr Hurd made it clear at once that they would have to vote again to get the right answer. Then Mr Major said how impor- tant it was that we all went ahead together. The second Danish referendum arrives and Mr Hurd hints that Britain might, despite previous promises, isolate Denmark, and Mr Major demurs, but so softly that no one quite believes him. Or look at Bosnia. Mr Major's folksy interest in Our Boys serves to conceal Mr Hurd's willingness to let Ser- bia win. Or Hong Kong, where Mr Major's chumminess with Chris Patten hides the fact that Mr Hurd has forced the Governor to back down. The Prime Minister does the matey bit for home consumption. The Foreign Secretary does the posh bit which makes his master seem credible abroad.
Since this sort of thing is not Mr Major's bag, it is fair to guess that the Govern- ment's vision of Europe is Mr Hurd's. It is a modernised version of the Congress of Vienna. Talleyrand and Metternich and Castlereagh decide everything, and any- thing that blocks their power to decide national feeling, democracy, parliaments, national laws — is 'unhelpful', 'tiresome', `not sensible' or suchlike Hurd-words. This explains Mr Hurd's enthusiasm for giving so much power to the Council of Ministers in the treaty. His happiest model of effi- cient and enlightened decision-making is of a small body of people as civilised as him- self. This is not a contemptible idea at all: it is conceived in the best interests of peace and stability. But it is an idea opposed to parliamentary government and I am sure the voters would reject if it were frarildy presented to them, which is why the Gov- ernment resists a referendum. Funny that it should be promoted by the most demotic Prime Minister in our history.
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