An unhappy anniversary for the Emperor Ming
Michael Cove says that the Lib Dems have retreated to their comfort zone. Sir Menzies Campbell's cringe-making attempts to adopt a demotic style are matched by boring politics Ivith less than a fortnight to prepare for the first anniversary of Menzies Campbell's assumption of the leadership of the Liberal Democrats, Spectator readers may be wondering how best to mark the occasion. I have no doubt that subscribers to this magazine will want to celebrate the happy day, on the same basis as they might once have raised a glass on the Queen Mother's birthday. The survival of this magnificent, antique Scottish figure into the 21st century provides a link with our past that no true Conservative can fail to enjoy.
Yet while natural conservatives will want to celebrate the happy completion of the first year of Ming rule, the same, sadly, cannot be said of the nation's dwindling number of Liberal Democrats. For the country's third party, the last 12 months have been arid times. Dropping in the opinion polls, neglected by the news media, increasingly marginal to the nation's debates, the Lib Dems have become like Chelsea Pensioners — magnificent in their way but redolent of another age.
It is striking that the eclipse of the Liberal Democrats should coincide with Ming's accession to the leadership. He is, in a way, the purest living embodiment in British politics of the Peter Principle — the law which dictates that people will rise just one level above their natural slot in life, to a position in which their weaknesses are then cruelly exposed.
As deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ming had found his metier. He was the Sergeant Wilson to Charles Kennedy's Captain Mainwaring — the suave, classier, better-educated number two whose dry style left everyone wondering how on earth he put up serving with under his chaotic superior. If Ming had never challenged for the leadership, everyone would have agreed that it was a tragedy he'd never enjoyed the top job. But now that he actually has the leadership, a very different sort of tragedy is playing itself out.
The first sadness is that a polished and charming ornament of Edinburgh's haute bourgeoisie, and therefore a representative of one of Britain's most refined social cohorts, should have had to affect a populist mateyness which does not become him His attempts to pretend to an interest in Coronation Street (naming as his favourite character someone who hasn't been in the show for years) and his lumbering references to the Arctic Monkeys have compromised an old-world dignity which had survived intact for nearly six decades.
The second misfortune is that a man whose courtroom style had won him a reputation as a skilful advocate should now have been so firmly branded in the public eye as a poor communicator. Nervous at Prime Minister's Questions, unsettled, like Roy Jenkins before him, by a demotic style of debate which seems to have left his more gracious approach behind, Ming also lacks Charles Kennedy's ease on telly without even having much more presence on the big-platform occasion.
The third pity is that the Liberal Democrats, having once enjoyed a reputation for innovation and creativity, should have embarked, under Ming, on the policy equivalent of a long mid-afternoon snooze. The Lib Dems were once the party you went to for environmental dynamism, but just as the nation has woken up to the scale of the crisis, it's the Conservatives who are displaying the boldest and most creative thinking in this area. And it's not just on green issues that the third party is feeling its age. Whether it's social justice, where the Tunbridge Wells MP Greg Clark has done more to focus attention on inequality than any other opposition MP, or civil liberties, where Dominic Grieve and David Davis are the opponents Labour fear, traditional areas of Liberal Democrat strength have been taken over by the Tories. Take a gander at the Lib Dem party website and you'll find that all its spokesmen's statements are reactions to what the other parties are doing — with scarcely a fresh idea from one month to the next.
And the one policy idea which they have made a great deal of, their tax proposals, have been savaged as incoherent by Paddy Ashdown's former policy chief. No wonder. The Lib Dem Treasury team claimed to be tax-cutters because they would lower the basic rate of income tax by 2p in the pound, instead raising revenue through taxes on pollution. So far, fair enough. But Lib Dem local tax plans would involve levying an additional local income tax of at least 3p (and possibly 5p) in the pound. So do the Lib Dems believe in shifting the tax burden from income to consumption or not? No wonder, with such confusion, they've shied away from any policy innovation anywhere else.
Tragically, and this is Ming's fourth misfortune, the Lib Dems have retreated to their comfort zone, attempting to recreate the warm glow they felt when they were marching arm-in-arm with the SWP against the Iraq war, by making their strongest pitch on foreign policy. In the recent debate on Iraq Ming spoke with a forceful eloquence which will have reminded fans of his golden era, but the content of what he said soon fell apart under scrutiny. His demand that British troops withdraw to meet an arbitrary timetable was widely recognised as militarily naive. But, worse than that, for the party of Gladstone, Ming's insistence on rapid withdrawal would leave Iraq's liberals and democrats to the wolves. How ethical is a foreign policy which, when it sees trade unionists and feminists fighting clerical fascists, decides that the best thing to do is to give the clerical fascists a freer hand?
But then Ming's whole approach to foreign policy is neither liberal nor particularly democratic. Discussing the wider Middle East, his only comment on Syria was a demand that the Golan Heights be returned to Syrian control, in order to satisfy the amour-propre of the ruling Assad dynasty. The part Syria has played in destabilising Lebanon's nascent democracy, and its role in the murder of Rafiq Hariri, were ignored. On the Middle East peace process itself, Ming argued that the main obstacle to peace was the fact that 'on both sides of the aisle in the US Congress, there is almost uncritical support for Israel'.
There may well be a place in British politics for a party which argues for greater concessions to Baathist tyranny and believes there is a malign Zionist lobby controlling American foreign policy, but one had rather hoped George Galloway had cornered the market. That the leader of the Liberal Democrats should enjoy what most acknowledge to be his finest hour as leader, making these sort of arguments just shows how far gone things are.
Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath and shadow minister for housing.
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