Political commentary
The gorge also rises
Ferdinand Mount
Halfway along the low corridor running round the hall stand six or seven men in dark suits bending' forward, craning their necks in unison towards the light from the window in the swing doors. As they hold this balletic posture, they sway apart a little to reveal in their midst a woman in a green full-skirted dress, also bending and craning towards the light. It is a modern-dress ballet on some ancient fable — Diana and her huntsmen in search of, well, not Actaeon perhaps, more like the Albatross. Applause is audible. Is it for Him? Has He sat down? Is the coast now clear for her to make her entry? Or, appalling thought, has He perhaps bagged her seat?
This annual pas de deux between Mr Heath and Mrs Thatcher has developed its own traditions. Balletomanes chatter about the strength of the handshake, the warmth of the smile; the applause is registered for each contestant, and then the degree of thud with which the boot is put in, At Brighton this year, it was generally agreed, Mr Heath's footwork displayed a so far unprecedented brutality which effortlessly won the clockwork orange. Not once but five times in speeches and interviews on radio and television did he contradict Mrs Thatcher's attitude to wage restraint, and give his support to Mr Callaghan's five per cent limit.
For once, he did mention the money supply, but only as something to be considered 'after' investment and taxation. How long after? Apparently, 'monetary policy can be used both to restrain, on which the emphasis has been in this country for far too long, and also for dealing with the economy successfully where expansion is promoted.' In other words, you can use it for not printing more money or for printing more money, lots more. Ah.
The speech was the usual sonorous unreconstructed tosh, and for the first time it was received with considerable impatience by a large section of the audience. And what he said was not the worst of it. After all, Mrs Thatcher herself was later to say that 'we do not rejoice at Mr Callaghan's discomfiture'. It was his graceless failure to acknowledge her leadership or even her existence that really stuck in Tory gullets. Impatience gave way to rage and, even in the case of Shadow ministers, to blank astonishment. They thought they knew Ted pretty well by now, but this time . . . What was he playing at?
Why was he plodding back into the wilderness again? How could he ever hope for a job from Margaret after this? Was he pursuing some sort of de Gaulle strategy? The Stuarts in exile are probably a better parallel. It is Mr Heath's practice at party conferences these days to set up his court at some gourmets' rendezvous fifteen or twenty miles out of town. The faithful and the curious are summoned thither for vast banquets from which they reel home across the water, no wiser about the Pretender's invasion plans but befuddled with self justifying talk about old times, only now and then lit up by a flash of imperious disdain to remind the visitors that he really still believes in all that stuff about the divine right of kings. Meanwhile, at Wheeler's Hotel adjoining the conference centre bathfuls of champagne await the Pretender's return.
Some of Mr Heath's friends regret the • absence of his sensible advisers Sir Timothy Kitson and Mr Kenneth Baker, who could have been relied on to soften the rough edges. Perhaps, but that leaves out of account an unnoticed element in Mr Heath's behaviour. Solitary he may be, disappointed too, but there is also a certain cussedly cheerful abandon in his carry-on. Shocking though it may seem, there is a sense in which he is just having a good time.
But then most Conservatives are long past caring about Mr Heath's happiness; they care only about how much damage he may be doing to their prospects of office. Every time he opens his mouth he reminds people that the Tories are divided about wage control. His dissenting so loudly and clearly matters more than Mr Prior's admission that circumstances could arise in which wages might have to be limited by law, which everyone knows. Against that, the control of other people's wages is a popular cause. In stressing the existence of a profreeze faction in his party, Mr Heath may help to reassure those voters who still fear that a Conservative government would mean runaway inflation.
The paradox is that Mr Heath's supposedly patriotic defiance of party policy may damage his country more than his party. By keeping alive this dreary argument, he continues to misdirect public attention to wage control as the prime means of combating inflation. The only result of ten years of freezes, pauses and guidelines has been to muddle people thoroughly, but as Labour is now seen to be just as muddled as the Tories, there cannot be many votes in it either way.
Lower taxes and more policemen are the real vote-winners, and neither Mrs Thatcher nor Sir Geoffrey Howe had much difficulty in shifting the debate back on to their ground. Mrs Thatcher's speech hit just the right sobered-by-the-shadow-ofgreatness note. What she said was not particularly exciting or informative, but then it was not intended to be. She meant to sound like a Prime Minister and she did.
Onbalance then, the Conference is a success. The Conservatives begin to feel and look like a party of power again —which does not, alas, mean that they look any nicer. For hours on end, the gorge rose and stayed risen. Even those with long memories and strong stomachs could not recall a nastier debate on law and order. Little old ladies called for the rope and the birch and the stocks with a hideous relish. Vengeance might be reserved for the Lord, but they put in a strong underbid in case the Almighty failed to meet his commitments. Deterrence was the pretext, retribution the real motive. Similarly, in the Rhodesia debate the pretext was the avoidance of further bloodshed, but the underlying passion was a racial solidarity which dared not speak its name. Every call for Ian Smith to be allowed into Britain was received with rapturous applause. Can this be the same Ian Smith who systematically destroyed every politician standing for a multi-racial Rhodesia, who rebelled against the Crown and who still appears to be under the impression that all black men are recently rehabilitated cannibals? On Brighton station, I saw Mr Garfield Todd just turned seventy and frail now, leaning on his daughter's arm. Not much of a politician perhaps, too stiff and priggish for many tastes, but an honourable man, Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia for five years, then twice placed under house arrest by Ian Smith and once imprisoned without charge or trial. Even in South Africa they don't often do that to oPP°s" ition leaders, if they are white.
There is a sloppy coarseness about these frenzied cheers for Smithy, a hypocritical indifference to the true nature of the that the Rhodesian whites have brought upon n themselves. David Owen may be a rotten Foreign Secretary. But fumblings do not retrospectively justify the wilfully self-destructive and morally indefensible course of the Smith regime. The pity of it is that since Ian Macleod's death there has not been a Conservative politician with the guts to talk straight to the Right. As poor Mr John Davies stumbled on, he was cruelly barracked first by verbal abuse, then by the slow drumming of feet — the drumbeats of the white tribe. But his speech would have been inadequate even if he had not been ill. He failed entirely to make the obvious point that to lift sanctions noW would not merely be tricky internationally, it would be treacherous. For having. n° practical effect in the short time remaining, the lifting of sanctions could be taken only as a gesture of legitimation. And Britain Is pledged not to legitimise any regime which has not fulfilled the fifth principle that the settlement must be seen to be acceptable to the Rhodesian population as a whole. However stupid sanctions may be, we are stuck with them until a test of opinion has taken place. Funny, Mrs Thatcher didn't mention that.
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