POLITICS

Mr Heseltine's conversion: from Tarzan to chartered accountant

FERDINAND MOUNT

Iwouldn't pay too much attention frankly, you know,' the junior minister said, 'it's just Peter's annual wank.'

`Ah yes indeed,' I said.

`Does it every year, gets the Friday morning headlines. All forgotten by Saturday.'

`Quite so.'

And yet, while not wholly dissenting from this penetrating analysis of Mr Peter Walker's latest remarks, I could not help feeling that there was more to it than that or rather the analysis itself provoked furth- er reflection. For one thing, it instantly brought to mind Mr Kinnock's recent magisterial rebuff to Mr Derek Hatton: `Derek, you're a wanker.' And I was reminded too of the response from another Conservative junior minister a year ago to a modest proposal submitted by the pre- sent writer: 'Is this a serious thing, or just a mutual wank?' Clearly the term has spread a long way from the rougher haunts such as the football terraces (`Charlie Nicholas is a wanker' - Highbury visitors' stand, pas- sim). Partridge, thou shouldst be living at this hour. In fact, the latest edition of the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is not very helpful, beyond re- marking that wanker is 'the great working- class swear-word of today'. Partridge does refer to its connotations of effeminacy and unworthiness, but he misses, I think, the implications of self-indulgence, futility and sterility which the term carries when most precisely used. He does rather better with `Walker' - which is apparently a piece of 19th-century slang 'signifying that the story is not true or that the thing will not occur', as in 'That's a Walker!'

What Mr Walker had to say was neither very original nor very startling. But I don't see much harm in him saying it. To declare that unemployment is too high and that, unless it comes down, the Conservatives will find it hard to win the next election is only to say what every great bore of today has said a dozen times. It is thin material to construct a Walker-throws-hat-in-ring story out of. In any case, Mr Walker's hat has been in the ring so long the cleaners have to dust it regularly.

Mr Walker, it must be admitted, does not bear a close resemblance to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. But better a few low- grade maxims and reflections than none at all. It is just as sterile to insist that ministers and politicians generally should confine themselves to 'hard' policy pro- nouncements. To narrow the political con-

versation in this way really is to turn politicians into desiccated calculating machines. If Mr Gladstone were to publish this November a pamphlet entitled The Vatican Decrees In Their Bearing On Civil Allegiance, no doubt they would be saying in the members' lobby that 'it's just the GOM's autumn wank'. I also rather doubt if the pamphlet would sell 150,000 copies by Christmas, as it did in 1874.

This shortage of ample, reflective dis- course, of open-minded ambling round the subject - in short, of political wanking both impoverishes political discussions and misleads the bystander. The exclusive con- centration on hard policy makes it more, not less difficult to see what is really happening and the way things are going. Traipsing round the seaside resorts in September and October, you have to pick up the trail as much by noticing omissions and evasions - what the dog did not do in the night time - as by logging the frontal assaults and public reverses. To judge by the opinion polls and the Government's recent hesitations and retreats - on pen- sions and rates, for example - the ideas for which Mrs Thatcher stands proxy seem to be in eclipse. But if one tries to decode the sub-text, a slightly different impression takes shape.

I noticed, for example, a distinct uneasi- ness about the state of the teaching profes- sion. At most of the party conferences, it was possible to raise a cheer or two by berating Sir Keith Joseph's 'handling' of the dispute: deplorable, cack-handed, in- sensitive, etc. Yet not many people seemed inclined to go further and declare that the teachers were a splendid body of men and women doing a grand job (one, admittedly rather intemperate, not to say dotty speak- er at the Tory Conference who did try to argue this was howled down).

There was a lurking feeling that the teachers' strike tactics were only one in- dication that teachers, or at least those who belong to the NUT, did not have a profes- sional attitude and that, in a genuine profession, the terms of engagement would long ago have been agreed and broadened to include supervising meals, games and so on.

I have referred here earlier to the scepticism which now infects all parties about the possibility of borrowing billions to cure unemployment without adverse effects. Perhaps the most striking instance of this was Mr Michael Hese!tine's warning to the Tory Reform Group that jobs `created' or 'preserved' by government were not costless, because the taxes needed to pay for them destoyed jobs elsewhere; even in the Ministry of Defence a balance had to be struck between the need to protect employment in the defence industries and the need to keep a grip on public expenditure. One of the great gains since 1979, Mr Heseltine said, was the introduction of cash controls on public expenditure.

All this is the flat opposite of what Francis Pym asserted when he was Defence Secretary. And Mr Heseltine himself used to have a much more cavalier attitude toward public expenditure. Indeed, the conversion of Tarzan to chartered accountant - from the treetops to the counting house in one leap - is one of the more remarkable sights of the age, more remarkable really than the sobering up of the Labour Party, which is always more temperamentally inclined to fiscal au- sterity.

When Mrs Thatcher says in her Queen Victoria voice 'we will not reflate', she is only saying out loud what other politicians have more delicately to intimate by word and gesture. That of course is her advan- tage. Not only can she say these things - about inflation, about law and order, about parental responsibility - out loud, she can and does say them each year. Although I thought this year's was rather more zestful than the last three or four efforts, her content was even less original than Mr Walker's. But then leadership in politics often depends on not being afraid to repeat yourself - at least when some of the chords you strike are the right ones. Lots of people are rather fed up with Mrs Thatcher as a person; certainly quite a few Tory MPs like to prattle about the succession more than they did. But `Thatcherism' - 'Victorian values', ,petty bourgeois attitudes', whatever you like to call it - goes from strength to strength. And can one stage Hamlet without the Queen?

No prime minister since Mr Asquith has lasted longer than six years on the trot. Mrs Thatcher is now passing the longest survi- vors - Lloyd George, MacDonald, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson. All five had lost both their moral dominance and their sense of direction a year or two before losing office. She has not. The true test is whether she can now make the effort of will to cope with unemployment without losing either. That test is yet to come.