POLITICS
What Mr Hague's team intend to do about Mr Clarke and to him
BRUCE ANDERSON
Last week, William Hague secured a victory in his shadow Cabinet which had eluded both Margaret Thatcher and John Major in their Cabinets. He persuaded his senior colleagues to agree to a sceptical line on the European single currency. Mr Hague had already decided on one of his principal rallying cries for the next general election: 'Vote Conservative to save the pound'. The shadow Cabinet has now cleared the way for him to use it; he regards that as the most important thing he has achieved since becoming leader.
Others are less enthusiastic. On the night of Mr Hague's election victory, Ken Clarke brought his campaign team round to Hague HQ to toast the victor. Mr Clarke was in his customary rumbustious form, insisting, as he raised his champagne glass, that the congratulations were sincere; it was not true that the Clarkeites had only come round because they had run out of beer and crisps. But not all Mr Clarke's supporters were smiling. David Curry, an arch- Europhile, looked dyspeptic. Mr Curry did accept a place in the shadow Cabinet, but it is not clear whether he will last the course. He found last week's decision hard to swal- low and may still be suffering from indiges- tion.
Mr Curry's delicate stomach has already limited Mr Hague's freedom of manoeuvre. Less than three weeks after the Conserva- tive conference agreed on the need to avoid any recurrence of the destructive indiscipline of the last Parliament, there was a renewed outbreak. Ian Taylor, a front-bencher, let it be known that on Mon- day he had gone to listen to Peter Lilley with a letter of resignation in his pocket; if he had found Mr Lilley's comments unac- ceptable, he would have delivered it.
There is only one way that a strong lead- ership can respond to such behaviour: Mr Taylor should have been sacked immediate- ly. Other front-benchers might then have understood that if they want to make a complaint, they do so in the Leader's office and not in the press. But Mr Taylor was not fired, for fear of upsetting David Curry and George Young, another shadow Cabinet member. The unity which the shadow Cabi- net displayed last week could not yet be put under too much strain.
But the most important Europhile dis- senter did not join the shadow Cabinet. Though Ken Clarke likes to give the impression of insouciance, he understands the importance of timing. During the party conference, he stole some headlines by announcing that he still wanted to lead the Conservative party, while this Wednesday — the first Prime Minister's Questions after the recess — he presented Mr Blair with some helpful material. He wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph which, under a transparent guise of attacking Gordon Brown for indecision, was a declaration of war on William Hague's European policy.
On Wednesday morning, Mr Hague's staff had to interrupt the preparations for PM's Questions and have a meeting to decide what to do about Ken. It will not be the last such meeting, but the Hagueites do think that there is a solution.
They point out that Tony Blair has always had dissenters in his party; vide Tony Benn and Austin Mitchell this Mon- day. But they have never been able to threaten his authority in the way that the various warring Tory factions undermined John Major, because Mr Blair has always been able to set out his own position clearly and dominate the intra-party debate. As a result, dissident voices are marginalised, just as Ted Heath was in the 1980s; Mr Hague's advisers now intend to marginalise Ken Clarke.
That will not be easy, for Ken is not a Grocer Mark II. Mr Heath has spent much of the past 22 years slumped in his seat below the gangway, nursing his wrath to keep it warm. He has long grown accus- tomed to baleful solitude. But Mr Clarke enjoys conviviality; he has friends, and allies.
There are still a number of Tory MPs to whom Europe is a cause which transcends party allegiance. Just like Messrs Clarke and Curry, men such as John Gummer and Robert Jackson are passionate in their commitment to the cause of ever closer European union. They would prefer this goal to be achieved under a Conservative government, but above all, they would pre- fer it to be achieved. When the next elec- tion is fought as a contest between a Eurosceptic Tory party which has no inten- tion of ever joining a single currency and a Europhile Labour party which clearly intends to sign up as soon as possible, their loyalties will be stretched to the utmost. Some already are; during Monday's state- ment, Mr Jackson made an extraordinary intervention, inviting Gordon Brown to repudiate his pledge on a referendum. The implication is clear. Mr Jackson was not only conceding the next election to Labour; he was inviting a re-elected Labour govern- ment to use its authority to abolish the pound without further ado.
Mr Jackson seems convinced about Labour's resolve; Mr Clarke would like to stiffen it, with the help of Europhiles in industry and the City. Such a coalition could be created, but it would not be irre- sistible. The City is by no means unani- mous, and as the Institute of Directors would point out, industry is nothing like as united as Adair Turner of the CBI would have us believe. For many years, the C131 has been little more than a pressure group for the conventional wisdom. Much of the material it produces verges on the banal; the IoD has a lot more intellectual rigour. The CBI would deserve Marx's unfair description of Bentham: 'the facile, leather- tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence'. At the beginning of the Thatcher years, the CBI's then president, Sir Terry Beckett, called for a bare-knuckle fight with the government. This may explain why the CBI occasionally sounds like a boxer who has too many blows to the head.
But a Clarke-led Euro-campaign would be forceful. It could be relied on to dodge the issue of sovereignty and to try to per- suade the populace that a single European currency was simply a way of making it eas- ier to buy a round of drinks in Benidorm• The Tory party would be forced to respond; Mr Clarke would have to be fought all the way. There is an obvious danger: a split. If there is going to be any splitting, however, the earlier it happens the better, and as Norman Tebbit has observed, it is more likely to be a splinter than a split (I wonder if Lord Tebbit still believes that Ken Clarke ought to be the leader of the Tory party). The Tory party can afford to lose the odd splinter; what it cannot afford is another four years of paralysis Mr Hague won a battle last week, and also forged a new weapon. But it was by no means the final battle; he may have to use the weaponry rather sooner than he would wish.
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