POLITICS

The way for Mr Major to win: admit error, and tell the truth about the oily vicar

BRUCE ANDERSON

It is not yet impossible for the Tories to win the next election, merely improbable. But an improbable result will require a bold campaign. On present trends, there is no hope for Mr Major, so he must try to alter the trends. The aim should be to persuade the voters to reassess him and his Govern- ment, and that process ought to start with a defence of the Government's record.

At the moment, many voters — even including loyal Conservatives — believe that the Government's economic record is easily summarised: incompetence and dis- honesty. This is Mr Major's fault: he has made no attempt to explain himself, and in particular has never given his version of the events which led up to Britain's forced departure from the ERM.

At the time, the tacit assumption was that it would be both dangerous and unnecessary to do so. Dangerous, because monetary pol- icy is hardly a consensual matter in Tory cir- cles, so that Mr Major's explanation would reopen the debate and exacerbate disunity. Unnecessary, because two or three years of recovery would assuage the voters' feelings.

That strategy has failed. Thus far, this has been the first voteless economic recovery in British political history. Although the public may not remember exactly what happened in September 1992, the damage to the Gov- ernment's reputation endures.

There is only one way to alter that, and it involves doing something that no Prime Minister has ever attempted. Mr Major should commission an intellectually respectable audit of his Government's record. This would obviously include an acknowledgement that mistakes were made; until the Government admits that some things went wrong, the voters will not believe that anything has gone right. But not only is there much more to be said on the Government's behalf than is generally recognised: the mistakes were honest ones. Although the Government must take much of the blame for the recession, it is also enti- tled to some credit for the recovery. Minis- ters did lose control of inflation in the late Eighties, but that has now been rectified, with counter-inflation in better shape than at any time since the Fifties. Moreover, throughout the late Eighties and early Nineties, every time the Government made an error in monetary policy, the Labour Party urged it to be still more erroneous.

This auditing exercise should have been undertaken at least a year ago, and to do so now would involve risks. But it is essential if the Government is to regain the electorate's trust.

Nor is it the only risk required. It is understandable that ministers should be reluctant to talk about Europe, but there is no way to avoid doing so. They must, there- fore, set out to turn defence into attack.

There is a Tory nightmare scenario for the next election. In his battlebus some- where in the middle of England, John Major switches on the Six O'Clock News to hear the headline: 'New Tory rift on Europe.' The newscaster then informs him that in a speech in Edinburgh, Kenneth Clarke was saying one thing, while Michael Portillo was telling the electors of Eastbourne the exact opposite. The PM's campaign then goes into paralysis, as his staff try desperately to obtain texts of Clarke and Portillo — and to prevent other ministers from weighing in with their contributions. It would be like Michael Foot versus Denis Healey on nucle- ar weapons in Labour's 1983 campaign. If a party has to treat a crucial election issue on the basis of damage limitation, the damage has already been done.

There is only one way to avoid such an outcome: to force the key ministers to agree now to sing from the same songsheet. Mr Major could lock Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine in a room with Michael Howard and Michael Portillo (or Robert Cranborne) and tell them that they will not be allowed out until they have produced a statement on which they can all agree. Or he could pro- duce his own document, and invite the same colleagues to study it, while informing them that he had no authorial pride: they would be allowed to change anything and every- thing in it, on one condition: that the changes would be agreed unanimously.

The end result would probably be a blend of Euro-phile form and Euro-sceptic con- tent. The Government would reaffirm its commitment to Europe, and its determina- tion to make the EU work. But it would point out that Europe cannot work until Europeans are working. A Europe of regu- lation and centralisation would be a Europe of declining competitiveness and rising unemployment, and would eventually col- lapse under popular discontent. The Tories would claim to be the only party in favour of a sustainable Europe. They could also point out the dangers of a Labour govern- ment giving away the competitive advan- tages won with the Maastricht opt-outs. Europe is one issue on which the Tories should not only find blue water between themselves and Mr Blair; it would be water that the voters would want to swim in.

The difficulties of dealing with Mr Blair cannot be underestimated. Chris Patten once mused on the hazards of getting to grips with his Liberal opponents; it was like a combination of insulting the vicar and wrestling with the greased pig at a village fair; the likely outcome was social opprobri- um and loss of dignity, as the pig made its escape. Tony Blair is also an oily vicar.

As the recent `Blair's anti-American activ- ities' fiasco proves, there is little point in drawing attention to his past. If Mr Clinton is re-elected this November, Mr Blair will claim kinship, but his real American mentor is not Bill Clinton, but Richard Nixon's sometime press secretary Ron Ziegler. Mr Ziegler would occasionally try to help his employer by declaring that certain state- ments the President had made were now `inoperative'. It never worked: the response was derision, and even worse trouble for Mr Nixon. But Tony Blair has gone further in inoperation than Mr Ziegler ever dared to; the Labour leader has declared his entire political past to be inoperative, and there is nothing that the Tory party can do about it.

So they will have to resort to a desperate stratagem that no politician would attempt except in extremis. They will have to tell the truth about Mr Blair. There is no point in dragging up his membership of CND or his Bennite 1983 election address, nor in claim- ing that he is a crypto-Stalinist, or a crypto- socialist. The voters will not buy it: rightly. What they might buy is the charge that Mr Blair is a crypto-soapflake. It should be easy to melt a soapflake.

On the American hustings, someone once asked a political aide about his master's atti- tude to sin. 'He's agin it' came the reply. Up to now, this has been taken as the acme of political cynicism and shallowness: no longer. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson have taken that shallowness and turned it into a political programme — and so far, they have got away with it.

They have been able to do so because the Government has been too enmeshed in its own travails to give a coherent account of itself. Unless and until that is rectified, the soapflake is en route to Downing Street.