Political commentary

Blackpool Revisited

Ferdinand Mount

'I have been here before,' 1 said to myself, the first time nearly 20 years ago, sitting in front of my first plate of oysters at the great round table in the Louis Quinze room at the Imperial Hotel. 'Randolph's putting his shirt on Quintin . . . Quintin's thrown his hat into the ring . . . Harold wants Quintin . . . no, Maurice says Harold wants Alec.' The oysters winked at me glassily. The mixture was too rich.

Never again till now have I been quite so aware of the bulk and smell of the upper classes in pursuit of power, nor of the sharpness of the distinction in their own minds between the leaders and the led. How firmly the rank-and-file were placed that week on the led side — to be lulled, gulled and sent away. They sat and clapped and cheered and they scratched their heads as the ministers climbed back into their large black cars. An illusion perished, the illusion of participation in great events. It was all a fix. We were never part of it. We had never found the low door in the wall opening on to the enchanted garden.

The court is in exile still, the great house shut up, the chapel deconsecrated. Across the water, across the River Wyre anyway, Ted Heath keeps state as he does every year, summoning journalists to gourmet levees in his country-house hotel. But each year the old religion comes out a little more openly at the conference itself. The old cries are heard again — Church and State and Commonwealth.

And so are the old fears. 'We'll be out of power for a generation . . . the Tory Party will disappear from the pages of history.' Those cries were to be heard in 1963 too. But this time the usual little puffs of panic have inspissated into a settled gloom. And unlike in 1963 the Prime Minister's critics mostly believe that the election is already so irretrievably lost that there is little to be gained by a change of leader before it. Talk of putting up a token candidate against Mrs Thatcher next month dribbles on. If it took 70 Tory defections in the Norway debate to get rid of Chamberlain, how many would it take to persuade Mrs Thatcher to retire gracefully? Nobody knows, and few believe in the possibility.

The recusants, except for Mr Heath himself, speak mildly of wanting only 'slight modifications', 'attention to the social consequences'. On the platform, Mrs Thatcher's supporters speak of 'holding on', 'seeing it through', 'keeping our nerve'. They criticise the recusants for feebleness more than for heresy.

Yet, the more open the split becomes, the deeper you can see it goes. The alternatives proffered by the 13 younger MPs and the sacked Ministers may not add up to much in economic terms — a few more cams and tunnels, a bit more inflation. Yet they imply a quite different view of what politics is about.

If the Marchmains had had a third son, they should have called him Norman. Mr St John Stevas is the nearest thing I know to a Flyte — half Brideshead with his sense of duty and his incense-laden melancholy, half Sebastian with his sudden skipping away from awkward questions. True, Mr Stevas may have had to work to achieve the purple while most of the blue-chips were born into it. But for that reason, I find it all the easier to compare him to Disraeli as an ideologue, the only runner in a tongue-tied field who can articulate the credo of Coningsby. The Stevas style of speaking may be rather peculiar — Gothic revival with a wealth of corbels and encaustic tiles. Yet he does put over what they are all really on about — Mr Heath, Sir Ian Gilmour and the rest. Young England, well, Young England lives.

Translated in modern terms, the noblesse-oblige view — what Marx called 'feudal socialism' — implies the Brandt Commission and incomes policies and Keynesian economics. Nothing happens, nothing can happen unless we in government make it happen: left to itself, without us, the world stands still. The people are to be elevated not liberated, and we are the elevators because we have the monopoly of compassion.

Mr Stevas's references to religion are usually taken as mere Papist patter. Yet as he points out, the growing distance between the Church of England and the Conservative Party is one of the most significant political facts of today. The modern C of E, obsessed by unilateral nuclear disarmament and overseas aid, is more and more a Christian Socialist church. Dean Norman defends a lonely pulpit.

Now the Tory faithful — I mean the conference rank-and-file — are not like that at all. They are more interested in creating wealth (and hanging on to it) than in distributing it. If asked, they would say vaguely that Christianity ought to be kept out of politics. They believe in an eye for an eye, if not several eyes. In spite of cramming the streets with policemen and founding his academy of short, sharp shocks, poor Mr Whitelaw had a dreadful time on Tuesday afternoon. And it won't help if he brings back the birch either. They'll only start asking for the thumbscrew.

The agenda at Blackpool is a remarkable document. It is misleading to pick out the handful of resolutions on unemployment calling for reflation. The huge majority are pure Thatcherite in spirit — or rather they attack the Prime Minister for not being Thatcherite enough. This is one agenda that scarcely needs fixing.

The Tory activists may dread the 'electoral catastrophe' of which the recusant MPs now speak quite openly. But if so, they really don't show it much. Like most zealots, they find it hard to imagine how the voters could really come to reject such selfevident wisdom. And even when they do contemplate losing the election, it is not with such keen personal dread as the average Tory MP.

Besides, there is now for the first time in this generation not one serious enemy but two. The arithmetic becomes hopelessly but also comfortingly obscure. Within the space of a morning, I was told that the Social Democrats were bound to let Labour in, that they would probably get in themselves and that they would enable the Tories to squeak home.

Inside the parliamentary party, the dread is altogether more intense. And so is the struggle to bend Mrs Thatcher. It is not so much the handful of backbenchers — all known Heathmen — who have come out. It is more the doubts expressed through, and to, the Prime Minister's closest colleagues, the 'agnostics', Mr Whitelaw and Lord Carrington. But even these doubts have a curiously indistinct quality. Quite what is being asked, except that things should somehow be made less awful, is not clear. Would the go-ahead for the Channel tunnel, plus a reduction in the national insurance surcharge, be enough to keep the dissidents quiet?

The sticky nature of the struggle is heightened by its being played out before an audience which is remote, as though cut off by plate glass, and so unable to help a Prime Minister who remains in tune with their instincts. The conference may be less difficult for her than the press build-up suggested. But that is only because the nature and constitution of the Tory Party makes the conference less important than its coverage suggests. The conference was, after all, designed to mobilise a mass partY for the sole purpose of returning Conservative members to Parliament. It was not meant to pick leaders or influence policy, and it never has.

There are certainly no fewer hangers and floggers here than there used to be. There may even be more, but they are not such grand hangers and floggers. They would like to love Mrs Thatcher. She is, after all, one of their own, the first since the war. Instead, their feelings baulked by the Government's lack of visible success turn into sourness against Mr Heath. He was heard mostly in silence with only the occasional shout of 'rubbish'. Yet every jibe against him by other speakers was applauded with delight and relief, and Sir Geoffrey Howe waltzed away with an ovation only some what hyped by a bomb scare in the hall during his more pedestrian passages. In this futile forum, alas, even thin support is of little use to Mrs Thatcher. For this is only .a rehearsal, and we are only the studio audience.