POLITICS
Has Blair found his Scargill, and Hague his Militant Tendency?
PETER OBORNE
Like many people who have come a very long way in life, Heseltine feels ambiva- lence bordering on open hostility towards his modest, provincial roots. Only this can explain the snobbery allied to a certain social unease which seeps out of his autobi- ography like an oil leak. This unhappy psy- chological condition found its most virulent expression in last week's Spectator. Drawing on all the grandeur of his arboretum, his acres, his monogrammed iron gateway and his Northamptonshire mansion, Heseltine expressed a fastidious disgust for William Hague and what he represented — 'Little Englander Poujade lower-middle-class self- enrichment'.
In that killer phrase, Heseltine unwittingly explained why his own political career, so richly promising and enriched by many redeeming patches, can only be judged a fail- ure. Margaret Thatcher had a genuine, unaf- fected admiration for what Michael Hesel- tine sneeringly called the lower-middle class- es: that honest, hard-working, decent, patri- otic body of men and women who live in the suburbs and strive to better themselves and do well for their families. They responded by winning her three successive elections before defecting to Tony Blair in 1997. Heseltine's social complex does not merely explain why Thatcher succeeded while Heseltine failed. It also illuminates the central paradox of his career: how a highly successful small busi- nessman who believed in free markets and hated state regulation could simultaneously celebrate the idea of corporate government and the European Union.
This week has emphatically belonged to those very Poujadist lower-middle classes that make Mr Heseltine feel so squeamish. There has never been anything like the uprising that brought Britain so swiftly and so clinically to its knees. There had been hints of what was to come over the past few years: the Countryside Rally that immo- bilised London, the half-hearted 'clump-the- pump' campaign earlier this year, whose fail- ure gave the government a false assurance that all was well. But nothing like this. Blockades, strikes and disruption on the roads have indeed formed part of the vocab- ulary of British political protest in the last 50 years. But that kind of activity has almost invariably been organised by the trade unions and the Left. Till now the annual Oxford and Cambridge rugby match at Twickenham has been the only authentically documented example of a middle-class riot.
This week's blockades set a new pattern. The trade unions are not involved: indeed, the drivers and hauliers are defying the direct orders of the Transport and General Workers' Union boss, Bill Morris. When the Socialist Workers' party turned up at the refinery at Coryton in Essex, it was made very clear that they were not wel- come. Small businessmen and small farm- ers are the driving force — exactly the com- bination that fuelled Poujadism in 1950s France. What this week's protesters have in common is that they are all losers from the Blair Revolution. Big business, the public sector, the arts establishment, the trade unions, the media class — all these have benefited from the transfer of power that took place in May 1997. But New Labour's big, warm vision of British politics has no room for the small farmer or the small busi- nessman. They are as dispensable to Tony Blair as the kulaks were to Joseph Stalin. It is telling that Tony Blair claimed the crisis was over after negotiating with the big oil companies — a corporate constituency with which New Labour feels at home — and not the hauliers themselves.
They are, indeed, the very 'forces of con- servatism' that Tony Blair condemned with a `It makes more sense after 14 pints.' sneer during his infamous party conference at Bournemouth this time last year. A great deal of New Labour strategic thinking is based on the early experience of Margaret Thatcher's government after 1979. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the care and attention that Millbank planners have devot- ed to studying this heroic period of British history. David Miliband, the austere head of the No. 10 Policy Unit, has long been agonis- ingly aware of the need for an Arthur Scargill-like hate figure to give Blairism, at present a muzzy concept, some robust defini- tion. This is why Labour politicians have, at different times, implausibly tried to claim that hereditary peers or fox-hunters posed a potent threat to the British way of life.
These fuel protesters are more fertile ter- ritory. It is possible that the miscellaneous and, in many ways, life-enhancing bunch of protesters outside power stations will turn out to have done Tony Blair a most tremen- dous favour by providing him with a worthy adversary. The private briefing from the heart of Downing Street was lurid: there have been allegations of political conspiracy and some of the language used has echoed the words used by Harold Wilson about shipworkers in 1966 or by Thatcher about miners in 1984. Even so, Tony Blair had no choice but to invoke his special emergency powers — and what a pleasure to see the Privy Council, so long dismissed by experts as a moribund piece of constitutional machinery, roar back into lusty life courtesy of last Monday's special session at Balmoral.
The Prime Minister did not want to fight this battle: but he has been fighting on ter- rain that suits him well. Not so William Hague. While Tony Blair has been playing the role of Margaret Thatcher, the Tory leader has found himself in the same situa- tion that confronted Neil Kinnock in the miners' strike. Kinnock found himself in an invidious position where he could neither support nor condemn the miners. It is plain that William Hague is behind the hauliers and farmers with every sinew in his body they are, after all, his natural constituents. But he is quite unable to lend public sup- port to a course of action that threatens to bring Britain to a halt. It is a miserable predicament, not of his own making, and this week the Tory leader was showing no signs of finding a solution.
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