Political commentary
Begetting on the side
Charles Moore
Blackpool Q ir Russell Sanderson, the chairman of L./the Executive Committee of the Na- tional Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, the body whose conference this actually is, seems to have been the only man rash enough to state publicly the at- titude adopted by the Conservative Party when it faces a sexual scandal. 'Some peo- ple, particularly some sections of the press, seem to think that because Mr Parkinson 'has fallen on hard times, and he has, that we should all denigrate what has happened and throw him over. It is not the way we do it in this party. I am sorry but it is not,' Sir Russell told us in the ballroom of the Im- perial Hotel on Monday night; and the man who now says we must call him plain Mr Gummer (Selwyn To Quit — Official), blinked for a second above the parapet and agreed.
Well, what is the way we do it in this ,party? If Mr Parkinson had made a fool of 'himself on Panorama an hour later, might 'there not have been a touch of denigration and a spot of throwing over? The method followed in such situations is to watch the 'clapometer'. The post is put in piles for and against, like ballot papers on election night. The telephone calls are similarly divided. But because politics is such ner- vous work, politicians start tampering with the clapometer. A back-bencher tells a newspaper that he is worried, and the next day 'Senior Tories Say Parkinson Must Go'. Everyone waits to see how his opinion is bounced back at him and then alters it ac- cordingly. The Prime Minister's 'loyalty' to Mr Parkinson, for instance, would not have been exerted to save him if the mood had seemed decisively against him. Mrs That- cher could have reinterpreted it as the per- sonal loyalty of friendship which she could not, unfortunately, allow to stand in the way of reasons of state. As it is, or rather, as it appears before Mr Parkinson has been received by the conference on Thursday, the mood changed decisively in his favour on Monday. Mr Gummer began to seem warmer towards him, and Mr Du Cann took the pulse of the Conservative back benches and pronounced it steady with that reassuring air that only a really expensive doctor can command.
People may think all this very low politics, but how else could the Government or the Conservative Party arrive at a sensi- ble view? It just is not fair to expect politi- cians to be arbiters of complicated ques- tions of personal morality; and you only have to listen to the excited discussion tak- ing place here at every table and in every bar
to realise that this one is complicated. What was the nature of Mr Parkinson's promise
to Miss Keays? Was the promise repeated; if so, when? Was Miss Keays trying to em- barrass Mr Parkinson by arriving in Lon- don at the weekend and being photograph- ed (some friends of hers did take the trouble to tell a television company when she was coming)? Who broke the liaison off? Did either parent want the child?. No one can avoid asking these questions, and in Blackpool they are asking them in more Anglo-Saxon English; but neither is anyone in the Conservative Party, nor in fact anyone at all, in a position to answer them authoritatively and so hand down a final moral judgment.
The only facts on which judgment can be passed are simple. They are the fact of Mr Parkinson's transgression, the fact of the pregnancy and the fact that Mr Parkinson, after promising marriage to Miss Keays, stayed with his wife, Mr Parkinson's con- duct is copybook Victorian — no abortion, no elopement, the penitent return to domesticity in Potters Bar. Although, like millions of others, he broke the rules of society, he did not set out to defy conven- tion, and he has tried to make amends. A promise to a mistress is now thought by some to be binding above vows made to a wife: Mr Parkinson has successfully asserted the morality of the family against this view, and so acted in a Thatcherly way. Anyway, Mrs Thatcher did not have to decide whether his behaviour was of an elevated kind, but only whether it was deliberately scandalous. It was not, and so her only remaining concern is whether the Conservative Party can stand it. It looks as if it can.
But might it become a slightly sadder and a wiser party as a result? The Tories who love saying 'a man's private life is his own affair' arc often the same people who de- mand a presentable wife from a parliamen- tary candidate, or who, as MPs, show off their family at all electorally significant moments. Homosexual or sexless Conser- vative candidates frequently rope in girls to be their 'fiancee' for the duration of the campaign. The more unscrupulous ones ac- tually marry them. And yet if Mr Parkinson were to leave in disgrace and puritanism, in- vigilated by the whips, were to stalk through Westminster, the alteration of MPs relationships with their secretaries would be as dramatic as the effect of AIDS in New York.
As well as the humbug of advertising the joys of a marriage or a family which one is busily betraying, there is the sheer pointlessness of it all. The belief of Conser- vative constituency associations that the possession of a wife is a sign of good character is not borne out by the facts; and the strain upon candidates who try, against their characters, to satisfy this bogus ideal is great. The constituency associations look for a marriage as a vote-catching badge of a contented private man: the candidate often comes to look for a marriage because it is a passport to a public career. If the private life is treated as a qualification for public work, it loses much of its privacy and in do- ing so, much of its meaning. One of the best strengths of the Labour Party before Glenys Kinnock came along was that it never tried to play Happy Families with its candidates.
The Parkinson affair makes the point particularly strongly. It is unfair to say that Mr Parkinson ever set himself up as an authority or even an exemplar of morals, but he did not dissent from the picture painted of him. This picture did more than reflect the truth that he is a nice man, it em- bodied him as Thatcherism in practice — the energetic yet contented, working-class yet presentable, rich yet public-spirited suc- cess story. He did A Room of My Own' in the Observer colour supplement, about the comfort of family life in his handsome old vicarage in the Green Belt. Even before the scandal, people thought it was all a bit too good to be true; but for the style of politics cultivated by Mrs Thatcher — a mixture of sermonising and self-advertisement — Mr Parkinson seemed ideal. Since his public political role was mythological, whereas, say, Sir Geoffrey Howe's was severely prac- tical, Mr Parkinson has fallen further than would Sir Geoffrey if he were to start beget- ting on the side. Mr Parkinson may well prove an excellent Trade and Industry minister — he was, despite the rumours about wanting the Foreign Office, par- ticularly keen to invent and fill such a post, but it will have to be as a quite different sort of politician. His wife's building company, which has recently christened its new head- quarters 'Parkinson House', is paying tribute to a Parkinson that is no longer there.
Probably most constituency associations will go on 'obsessively searching for perfect wives in order to get more work out of their candidates. Certainly all those jolly secretaries like Miss Keays, who work for and frequently marry and fornicate with Conservative politicians, are taking a relax- ed view of the question and will keep the framed photographs of Cecil on their desk staring accusingly at Mr Gummer. Being a self-congratulatory lot, the Tories will pro- bably remember this affair chiefly .for their own magnanimity, and forget that afflic- tions like these are an almost uniquely Con- servative phenomenon in British politics. They may even turn Mr Parkinson into a romantic figure, and imagine that the poor baby due in January really is, as the popular press calls it, a 'love child'.
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