POLITICS
Sir Geoffrey and the deep loneliness of the long-distance leader
NOEL MALCOLM
No man is a hero to his valet.' As has been pointed out, this well-known truth says more about valets than it does about heroes. Similarly, no disagreement within a government is a simple disagreement to a journalist. This may tell us less about governments than about journalists, for whom 'Minister lashes Thatcher' is better than 'Minister disagrees with Thatcher', and 'Minister challenges Thatcher for lead- ership' is best of all.
And yet, and yet. Ministers would not have got to where they are now without knowing that simple phrases and state- ments take on new meanings in the hot- house atmosphere of high politics. It's not just that they are more liable to be mis- understood; they actually mean more than they would in ordinary life, just as raising your hand at an auction means more than it would if you did it in the safety of your own home. Sir Geoffrey Howe is a cautious man who deals in well-weighed syllables a living disproof of all hasty generalisations about the impulsiveness of the Welsh temperament. When he slipped an un- scripted clause into his speech at Perth last week, arguing that the Government should not go on for ever qualifying its willingness to join the European Monetary System with the proviso 'when the time is ripe', he must have been fully aware that his sub- ordinate clause would sound very insub- ordinate indeed.
Words and deeds often take on their extra burden of meaning in politics by being part of a pattern of other sayings and doings; every one of them may be indi- vidually harmless or humdrum, but the cumulative effect is something different. Mrs Thatcher's failure to give a straight answer when Mr Kinnock asked her if she agreed with her Chancellor's exchange rates policy was in itself unremarkable. Everyone has known about this disagree- ment for the last three months, and Mrs Thatcher's policy on straight answers at Question Time has been known for even longer than that.
Then there was Lord Whitelaw's observation that things would be a bit wobbly in the Conservative Party when Mrs Thatcher eventually stepped down: surely an unexceptionable statement of the obvious.
As for Mr Brian Walden's interview with the Prime Minister, there is some room for doubt about what Mrs Thatcher actually meant when she said that there might one day be 'several young people' who could succeed her as party leader. It is possible that this was not so much a snub to the Howes and the Lawsons as a clever ploy to strengthen her support among the age- group where it might otherwise be most vulnerable. Today's younger ministers are the ones who would normally be least willing to link themselves indissolubly with Thatcherism; they have to think of their careers iter she has gone, and can be forgives or a little hedging as they dabble in the political futures market. Mrs Thatch- er's words were, it might be argued, an ingenious exercise in carrot-dangling to keep them on the true path. But a more likely explanation is that she was simply expressing, as before, her desire to go on and on, but trying to back it up with some sort of rationale this time in order to seem a little less power-mad.
To these speculations I cannot resist adding the purple provisos of Mr Brian Walden. 'I wonder if I understand Mrs Thatcher? I wonder if anyone does? How much does this passionate, repressed woman keep to herself? Is the certain sound of the trumpet a necessary outer protection for a deep loneliness within?' Alas, the deep loneliness of Downing Street (or was it a misprint for 'loveli- ness'?) does not easily yield up its secrets.
Oh well, back to Sir Geoffrey. The comments and silences of the last two weeks form a pattern, a matrix, in which his mild remark about the European Monetary System cannot fail to sparkle like a jewel. But what exactly does it mean? One thing it certainly does not mean is that Sir Geoffrey is an apostle of exchange-rate management. Memories may be short in politics, but it has surely not been forgotten that for four long years he was Mrs Thatcher's most loyal hench- men at the Treasury, removing exchange controls (which he regards as the best and most difficult thing he ever did), pushing up interest rates, letting the pound rise till the CBI squeaked, and insisting resolutely on the unbuckability of the market. The Financial Secretary, Mr. Lawson, tentative- ly proposed tying sterling to the deutsch- mark in 1981; but Sir Geoffrey, the Chan- cellor, was never enthusiastic about joining the EMS. 'When the time is ripe' was a phrase he frequently used on this topic indeed, it has a very Howeish ring to it. Mrs Thatcher might almost be tempted to say that Sir Geoffrey will become Prime Minister 'when the time is ripe'; but she is not that nasty.
But Sir Geoffrey was not thinking even momentarily of the party leadership when he wandered off his script at Perth. He knows that his stature stands high in the party already, and that if Mrs Thatcher strode under a bus tomorrow he would probably have the job. He knows too that he would not add to his stature by associat- ing any challenge to the leadership with such a politically unimportant matter.
No, the issue which matters to him is not exchange-rate stability but European co- operation, and the political point he is making is not about the future party leadership but about the nature of Mrs Thatcher's government. For a Foreign Secretary, a certain amount of Euro- enthusiasm goes with the job. Mrs That- cher can hammer on the table in Brussels asking for her money back, but he has to think of Europe in wider geopolitical terms. In pushing for greater European co-operation he knows that he is touching a nerve of bad faith in the Prime Minister, who has to pretend to be a good European even though all her instincts are against it. And with impeccable Thatcherites such as Lord Young welcoming the coming of 1992, he knows that the tide is running in his favour.
As for the political cut and thrust, it is undoubtedly true that he felt wounded by Mrs Thatcher's dismissive attitude, in the Walden interview, towards the senior members of her Cabinet. By ganging up with Mr Lawson, however, he is going for a collective show of strength rather than an individual display of pique. Mrs Thatcher is sometimes compared to the Duke of Wellington, whose comment on chairing his first Cabinet meeting was, 'Extraordin- ary! I gave them their orders, and they wanted to stay behind and discuss them.' Before coming to power she explained that she would not want to waste time having internal arguments in her Cabinet. It only takes a few senior ministers to remind her that internal arguments are preferable to external ones, and that she might waste even less time if she not only had a few more internal arguments, but actually lost one or two of them as well. She appeared to accept this with untypical grace in the Commons on Tuesday.
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