AND ANOTHER THING
Don't bother about the party, just take me to your leader
PAUL JOHNSON
Recently I wrote an article in the Evening Standard praising Tony Blair and contrasting his virtues with the shortcom- ings, moral and otherwise, of the Tory lead- ership. Some people drew the conclusion that I was planning to rejoin the Labour Party, to which I belonged in the 1950s and 1960s. Not so. Like Carlyle, I respond to leaders, if they measure up, but I dislike parties. There is something intrinsically wrong about a group of ambitious people banding together to achieve power, usually under a humbugging banner of principle. Disraeli was right when, in his hot youth, he called the Tory party 'an organised hypocrisy'. To some extent the phrase applies to all parties, anywhere, at any time. When Lord Randolph Churchill was trying to turn Conservatism into a populist party and was asked, in an unguarded moment, what Tory democracy really stood for, he replied, 'Oh, expediency, mostly.' Hypocrisy and expediency are the warp and the woof, the alpha and the omega of the political party.
I used to believe that the party, though evil, was a necessary evil. You could not in practice make a democracy work without the organising principle of party. When George Washington took office as the first President of the United States, he swore he would govern without party, which he regarded as a wicked survival from the cor- rupt Old World. But he found he could not do it, and a two-party system was emerging even in his own lifetime. 'Party' was origi- nally a dirty word in England too. But dur- ing the 19th century we came to believe in a stable, two-party system, and eventually this was the constitutional doctrine taught at the universities.
At Oxford, in the late 1940s, it was instilled into me that the two-party system was somehow 'natural' and explained why parliament functioned better in Britain than anywhere else. But time marches on and I no longer believe that parties, as we know them, will play a determining part in 21st-century political life. Like trade unions, they are blunt instruments which have a horrible habit of coming to exist for their own sake, rather than to achieve the ends for which they were originally created. Unions and parties are institutions which have served their historic turn.
One reason why we should hasten to get rid of the party is that it has become expen- sive, and therefore a source of corruption. The appalling scandals which have shaken governments in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium — and to some extent in Germany too — all have their roots in the financial needs of modern parties. For the sake of their party, around which clings a faint miasma of idealism, men will engage in the sale of government favours which they would not countenance to enrich them- selves — though inevitably party corruption leads to personal corruption too.
Now that old-style political ideology is dying, and few men and women enter poli- tics for altruistic reasons, party machines require more and more cash to function, and that money can only be realised by cor- ruption in one form or another. The financ- ing of the Labour Party by unions was always corrupt and is now, quite rightly, being phased out. But what will replace it? Individual subscriptions are not enough. The Tories, too, are discovering that their traditional paymasters are no longer so willing to foot the bill now that dogma is dead, the parties are converging on eco- nomic policy and the prospect of Labour in office no longer threatens red ruin. Sooner or later, then, and whatever they may say, both our main parties will have to adopt the spoils system to keep themselves sol- vent. As we merge with Europe, both Labour and Conservative will follow the continental pattern of using government patronage to generate income.
Will we be prepared to tolerate this degeneration? It is not as though party dis- tinctions matter that much any more. Socialism, as an alternative to market capi- talism, is a lost cause. An incoming Labour government will find its freedom of action painfully limited. When the Mitterrand Socialists took over France in the early 1980s, their left-wing monkey-tricks got short shrift from the international markets and they were soon forced to reverse all their key policies. Fifteen years later, the world financial system is much stronger and more autonomous than it was then — and punishes egregious behaviour by an individ- ual government more swiftly and compre- hensively.
There is little chance of a Labour govern- ment diverging radically from its Tory pre- decessor, even for a short time. Then again, as the parliamentary sovereignty of West- minster ebbs away, the freedom of action of a new government, even on issues which do not have a direct bearing on the economy, is increasingly restricted. The idea of Labour/Conservative as a perpetual polari- ty, with each party, as it takes office in turn, privileged to inscribe its policies on the statute book as if on a tabula rasa, makes no sense today. The parties, rather, are more like rival firms of caretakers, limited to cleaning and maintenance, structural changes being ordered from elsewhere. That is why I predict that the present party system will be replaced, in due course, by a nationalist/federalist dichotomy, each group seeking to operate on the founda- tions of European policy, in conjunction with continental allies.
Yet however the party system may change and decline, there will always be a place for the individual will in politics. So leaders will continue to matter. Indeed, insofar as parties disappear and national sovereignties are merged, leadership will matter more, not less. And let us not kid ourselves. However we may talk about classes and forces and 'long waves' in histo- ry, it is leaders who make it. The entire 20th century is a tale of leaders — of indi- vidual will, good or bad. Our times have been shaped by Lenin and Stalin, by Hitler and Mao Tse-tung — and by Roosevelt and Churchill, de Gaulle and Adenauer, Thatcher, Reagan et al. Subtract these names or individual wills and the century makes no sense at all. So, as we move beyond the age of ideology and the party, I will continue to study potential leaders and back those whom I consider to have the right qualities of intellect, morality and commonsense.
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