CENTRE POINT
Tory party politics has become a grim pursuit, where men strive only to do one another down
SIMON JENKINS
The Rose Garden was a mistake. John Major opened his bid to regain the Tory leadership with the cry, 'Put up or shut up', uttered in the dappled light of a June after- noon. This was not the right setting. Such a phrase should be shouted with defiance at a rally amplified by architecture and acous- tics to an audience roaring its support. That is how Baldwin silenced his media tormen- tors, accusing them of harlotry at a mass meeting of the party faithful. Mr Major stood blinking under the trees while camer- amen prowled out of focus behind his back. He looked like a fawn caught by his pur- suers in a woodland glade.
No leader should neglect the architecture of rule. British politics offers few stages on which a statesman can project his power. The House of Commons is a bear pit where the best a man can do is a good music-hall turn. Downing Street is a bourgeois cul-de- sac, slipped apologetically between the mighty Foreign Office and the no less ornate old Treasury building. Stripped of the authority of office, No 10 would be a humble townhouse, whatever splendours Walpole and Kent created inside. It is more the residence of a managing agent to the monarch across the park. Even the Secre- taries of State for Scotland and Wales have more distinguished façades on Whitehall.
The White House and the Elysee Palace confer power on their occupants. Downing Street confers anonymity. The office of Prime Minister gives the street an aura of potency. The street gives the office nothing in return. Big men (and women) are big in spite of it. Small men seen striding across its pavement seem merely small. The gar- den is even less impressive, a characterless patch overshadowed by a fortified wall like the exercise yard at Wormwood Scrubs.
In the past John Major has used Down- ing Street's modesty to good effect. During the Gulf war, the pavement was his plat- form. The Georgian brickwork formed a suitably sombre backdrop for his curbside chats with the nation. The image was com- forting, as of a country doctor reporting on a sickly patient. The Government was as well as could be expected, he would say. Progress was modest. He was modest. After the histrionics of Lady Thatcher, modesty was the order of the day.
Now modesty is at a discount. Mr Major must project command and control. Time was when a Conservative prime minister could turn to his sponsors, and those spon- sors could exploit the party's architecture either to support or eject him. Power rested within a circuit of Mayfair residences and St James's clubs. A 19th-century Tory could reckon to have covered every base by mov- ing from the salons of Lady Glencora and Madame Goesler to the smoking rooms of half a dozen establishments down Pall Mall and up St James's Street. There the Dukes of Omnium, the Daubenys and the Bon- teens dispensed power and champagne. There Dickens's ministries were decided between `Coodle and Boodle, since it was impossible for Foodle to act upon Doodle because of that unfortunate affair with Hoodle'.
As an MP in the season you could have walked along Piccadilly and up into old Park Lane and secured probable entry to one or another of Devonshire House, Cam- bridge House, Londonderry House, Dorchester House and Grosvenor House. After dinner you could return to an evening debate in the Commons and round the night off with a drink at the Carlton, Pratt's, White's or Brooks's. By the end of the evening you would know what was hap- pening, by whom and to whom — aside from the occasional jolt to the system deliv- ered by the electorate.
The Conservative Party is still not a democratic institution. It is a club. Its finances are secret and its leaders are elect- ed by a private ballot of little over 350 senior figures, the Members of Parliament. Such an electorate is not a collective of individuals. It is, as in the 19th century, a congeries of tribes, of dining clubs, lobbies and interest groups. It allocates power not by election but through the patronage of its upper echelons, as it always has done.
`He's into home shoplifting.' When such an institution loses its leader it must fall back on its social glue to reach coherent decisions. That glue was supplied, until the interwar years and even up to the Sixties, by the grandees and elder states- men who lived and moved in the clubs and big houses of London's West End. It was death duties and the Great Crash, not the universal franchise, that did away with this circle of influence, as one great house after another was demolished to make way for a hotel or an office block. Yet power in the party still rests with London-based oli- garchs, who still tend to dine most nights of the session other than in the bosom of their families.
These oligarchs have moved the locus of their activities. They have shifted from the drawing-rooms of Mayfair and the clubs of St James's Street to the town houses clus- tered round Great Peter Street and Smith Square in Westminster. It was from one such house that Mr Major plotted his seizure of power in 1990, and from another that he is now defending it. It was to one such house that Lady Thatcher retreated to lick her wounds after her defeat, and in another that the Eurosceptics have been plotting Mr Major's downfall. These places are not socially omnivorous, like Lady Glencora's staircase or Lady Londonderry's saloon, open each week to all talents and shades of party opinion. The Smith Square precinct is the architecture of conspiracy. Its houses have cells for drawing-rooms and are the natural habitats of cliques.
These things matter. The Tory party has supposedly democratised itself. Yet its social geography suggests it has merely moved from a narrow but open oligarchy to a more closed one. It generates its crisis mentality in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, where gossip grows into hys- teria, unleavened by the graces of a more diverse 'society'. Such politics is not diluted by romance or business or even sex. It is a grim, remorseless pursuit, where dark-suit- ed men strive only to do one another down.
I prefer the drawing-rooms and the clubs. They were decent places which knew the meaning of loyalty and a sense of propor- tion. Mayfair and St James's have always been healthier neighbourhoods than the noisome swamp of Westminster. Mr Major should never have trapped himself in that rose garden off Downing Street.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times
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