ANOTHER VOICE
What Margaret could mean for Major
CHARLES MOORE
hen BBC controllers appear on the air to defend an unpopular programme against criticism they love to say, 'Well, we've been attacked by the National Front and the Socialist Workers' Party (or equiv- alent representatives of Right and Left) on this one. So we can't be getting everything wrong.' It is a non-sequitur, and one likely to be favoured by the complacent. I fear the Prime Minister is falling into something similar.
He is being attacked by Lady Thatcher and Sir Edward Heath. Her new book and various interviews make clear that • Mr Major has been wrong about Europe, pub- lic spending, mortgage interest tax relief etc. She supports Mr Major as leader, but rather as if the father of the Prodigal Son had kept on sending out messages telling him that there was a nicely fatted calf wait- ing for him at home if only he would repent. Sir Edward, who at one period was as nice about Mr Major as it is ever given to him to be nice about anyone, is now tetchy. 'It is the Conservative's principle [sic] duty,' he writes in the Sunday Times, 'to prevent discontent from poisoning the nation.' And the author of the three-day week and the `Who governs Britain?' election goes on to tell his party to 'reassure the nation'. It's time to recognise that 'the European Union as a whole is the perfect embodi- ment of the Conservative vision,' Sir Edward explains.
For Mr Major, who tends to think that splitting the difference is the same as win- ning the argument, the temptation must be enormous. Encouraged by all those who understandably dislike hearing former statesmen justifying themselves, he will conclude that if Ted and Maggie are both angry the 'broad centre' of the Tory party must be reasonably content and the policy must be 'about right'.
It might be more useful to see this attack from both sides as an occasion for a choice. By coincidence (perhaps), the publication of Lady Thatcher's The Path to Power is closely followed by the 25th anniversary of Sir Edward's first and only election victory. The historical record invites inspection. The two ex-prime ministers offer opposing visions of their party and their country. Which, in the continuing absence of one of his own, should the Prime Minister choose?
One must recognise that Mr Major will never have beliefs in the sense that both Heath and Thatcher do. As Keith Joseph put it to her in 1975, both she and Heath have a 'passion to get Britain right'. Mr Major is no more amoral than any other politician, perhaps less than most, but he has no such passion. It is therefore point- less to try to prove to him that one such set is preferable: it is like describing Turner's `Rain, Steam and Speed' to a blind man. More productive, surely, to interpret these convictions politically, to show why one tends to win and the other tends to lose.
The Heath way leads to failure. Failure, in fact, is the biggest single characteristic of Sir Edward's period of leadership. Why did he fail? Part of it can be attributed to his strange personality. He reminds me of Hardy's description of a car in one of his poems — *hanging along in a world of its own'. It seems amazing, in retrospect, that a man with so few 'interpersonal skills' could ever have climbed to the top of this country's largest party.
But the personality cannot be the deci- sive factor, particularly as there are quali- ties of Sir Edward's which command respect. As Lady Thatcher herself puts it of the election campaign of 1970: 'He came across as a decent man, someone with integrity and vision.' There must be some- thing else, something to account for the failure of trade union reform, the U-turn over prices and incomes policy, the chaos in Ulster, the rise in inflation, the abolition of decent local goi7ernment, the unsuccessful battle with the miners and the double defeat of 1974.
I wonder if it does not come down to a phrase so banal that it once made the title of a book by Shirley Williams: 'Politics is for people'. All democratic politicians will agree that this is so, of course, but few will have air interior understanding of what it means. Such an understanding is to do not with intelligence, but with instinct or imagi- nation. It is to do with imagining what poli- tics might mean to the 99.9 per cent of peo- ple who are not its practitioners. Ted Heath lacks this faculty absolutely.
`We should appeal td every class, com- munity and region in the land,' says Sir Edward. But although he can advance this as a general proposition, he never knew what that word 'appeal' meant. You will sometimes meet people who say 'Ted Heath is right' about something; you will never meet someone who says, 'Ted Heath speaks for people like me.'
And that is what, for about 15 years, peo- ple did say about Margaret Thatcher. So much attention has been devoted to her alleged ideological rigour that much less has been given to her more effective attribute — identifying people's aspirations and expressing them. It is this which caused council house tenants to say, 'Maggie Thatcher got me my house', or policemen or soldiers or working miners to feel that she was rooting for them, or the poor of Eastern Europe as well as the millionaires of Texas to give her a hero's welcome, or taxi drivers'h six continents, even today, to tell you how marvellous she is.
This gift is perfectly compatible with being very unpopular from time to time, as Margaret Thatcher was. Indeed, it is a gift that goes with some unpopularity because if you identify strongly with some people you are likely to annoy others. Local gov- ernment clerks and television producers and teachers and social workers might boil with hatred whenever they saw her on the screen, but that, contrary to the Heath the- ory of government, was a price worth pay- ing. As many on the Left used to say in the 1980s, 'Why can't we defend our people as strongly as she defends hers?' Her defence of her own would sometimes defy the logic of her own formal convictions. No believer in pure free markets, for example, would countenance mortgage interest tax relief, yet there she is in Monday's Daily Telegraph saying that because 'I wanted everyone to be a capitalist', she viewed the cutting of such relief with 'horror'. Of such combina- tions of genuine belief with political oppor- tunism are election victories made.
This is where Mr Major is failing, not so much in policy as in the subtler art of inspiring hope in enough of the voters to win a majority in the House of Commons. The middle class — and nowadays that phrase encompasses most voters — is los- ing hope: farmers and small businessmen, mortgage holders, doctors, nurses, service- men, married couples with children, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, Tory journalists come to that. 'Does John Major want for me what I want for myself? Does he know what I want for myself?' we all ask, and answer comes there none.
What shall it profit him to sit down and listen to lectures from Lady Thatcher about Hayek and Burke and 'the strenuous defence of liberty'? Not a lot, I fear. But how about a long talk with her on the dead- ly serious business of getting votes?
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