POLITICS
Mr Hurd displays all the gravitas of a pregnant bishop
NOEL MALCOLM
`Obviously', said Mr Hurd in his version of their earlier deliberations, 'I considered the matter very carefully. I neither encour- aged nor discouraged him.' It's the sort of phrase that can sum up an attitude, a character, a lifetime. Suitably adapted ('Obviously, he considered life very care- fully . . .'), it could be carved on Mr Hurd's headstone. For he is the archetypal 'on the one hand, on the other' man, the professional middle-of-the-roader. His nasty run-in with Mr Heath gave some Schadenfreude to those Thatcherite back- benchers who suspected him of being the most unreconstructed Heathite in the Cabinet: this should force him, they felt, to swerve a little more closely into Mrs Thatcher's slipstream. But within days he was back in the centre lane, playing the conciliator between Mr Heath and an apoplectic Prime Minister. Never under- estimate the lure of the middle of the road for Mr Hurd: that is where, in his kind of politics, the overtaking lane is to be found.
The last three or four months have gone peculiarly well for Douglas Hurd. He has had a good phoney war. 'Statesmanlike', 'dignified', 'unruffled': the adjectives now follow him around like Homeric epithets, and he has earned them. He has shown that there is some real iron in his character (confirming, perhaps, the truth of that old saying about the long-term effect of sitting on fences). Where the Gulf is concerned, the unusual congruence of Mrs Thatcher's instincts with the pieties of the diplomatic world community has made things simpler for him, and he has risen to the occasion. What is more, the Conservative Party has discovered that he is good at dealing with awkward issues on television (or rather, it has rediscovered this, since he first display- ed this skill at the time of the Westland crisis). His handling of the Ridley affair in July was masterful: unlike Mr Kenneth Baker, he knows that the best way to limit damage is to begin by admitting to its existence. Mr Baker's complacent enthu- siasm appeals only to the party faithful; Mr Hurd, on the other hand, can appeal to the fair-minded but undecided voter. And in his conference speech last week he showed that he knows how to appeal to old- fashioned king-and-country Toryism as well, with his solemn and slightly elegiac references to British military history.
`Have we just been listening to the next leader of the Conservative Party?' one MP asked me as I left the hall after that debate (on my way to Mr Heath's press confer- ence). Less than a week before, of course, Mr Hurd had told an interviewer that he would not really care to be party leader; but such remarks merely indicate that Mr Hurd's training as a good diplomat has made him a good courtier too. It is one of the many resemblances between Douglas Hurd and Bishop Hurd, his 18th-century ancestor: according to the history books, 'Hurd's manners were courtly, and he was soon in high favour with the King . . . . In 1783 he was offered the primacy, which he declined "as a charge not suited to his temper and talents."' Bishop Hurd had literary interests, and wrote improving dialogues on such subjects as 'Sincerity in the Commerce of the World'. He described himself as a moderate Tory; but in Dr Johnson's opinion his views were 'woefully Whiggish'.
Mr Hurd describes himself as a 'dead- centre Tory'; but are his views; in reality, woefully Heathite? It is actually quite hard to tell, since his ministerial career (North- ern Ireland Office, Home Office, Foreign Office) has kept him well clear of those central issues of economic and social policy by which the contrast between 'Thatcher- ism' and what preceded it was most strong- ly defined. He must certainly have been a Heathite during the period 1968-74, when, as Mr Heath's political secretary, he was closer to him than most senior Tories of that time. But what sort of Heathite — pre-U-turn, or post? The answer Mr Hurd gave in his own book about the Heath government, An End to Promises, was that the post-1972 policies were 'right and necessary', and that 'the mistake was to be so absolute two years earlier in opposition to them'. Note that the mistake lay not in opposing them but in opposing them so absolutely: even when contemplating a U–turn, Mr Hurd favours a middle course between forwards and backwards.
It is one of the oddities of the present political line-up that Mr Hurd now seems closer in outlook to Mrs Thatcher than Sir Geoffrey Howe does; for on all the impor- tant issues bar one, Sir Geoffrey has always been a hard-bitten Thatcherite. The one exceptional issue is Europe, and here Sir Geoffrey, by being ever so slightly more daring in his coded utterances, has some- how contrived to make Mr Hurd look like a pillar of Brugeite orthodoxy. The For- eign Secretary's behind-the-scenes role in helping to push Mrs Thatcher into the ERM is widely acknowledged (though, as one very senior Foreign Office official told me, 'all this talk of a Hurd-Major axis is exaggerated; the hard ecu plan was cooked up by Major and Thatcher together Hurd had almost nothing to do with it'). But in public, where matters European are concerned, he has been cautious and cor- rect — and, when possible, silent. It is no accident that the 'foreign affairs' session of the party conference was so crowded out by the Gulf and Eastern Europe that not a single speaker was .called to discuss the most important issue facing this country: that of European political and economic union.
That is the other phoney war out of which Mr Hurd, so far, has done well. His new air of quiet scepticism on the subject of European union has led most backben- chers to think that he has fallen closer into line with Mrs Thatcher's views. But they continue to watch him warily, and will not really trust him until they see what tactics he adopts when battle commences at the Inter-Governmental Conferences in Dec- ember. If he does not show then that he can represent the will of the main body of the Conservative Party, which is anti- federalist, then all his other qualifications for eventual leadership of the party will not avail him. Deep down, however, this is one subject on which Mr Hurd's instincts are Heathite through and through. With his usual skill, he may seek a middle course between anti-federalism and federalism; but the result will be a position which is just slightly federalist. And a politician who tries to be only slightly federalist is like a girl who is slightly — only slightly pregnant.
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