POLE-AXING THE PARTY
by MPs who trust opinion polls, but cannot be trusted to take part in one themselves
THE uselessness of Tory MPs has to be experienced to be believed. When the philosopher Thomas Hobbes was asked why he had so few books in his study, he replied that 'if he had read as much as other men, he would have known no more than other men'. There were times during the first round of the Tory leadership election when I felt rather the same way about asking the MPs how they intended to vote: if I had talked to as many as other journalists had, I would have known no more than they did.
As the hours ticked away on Tuesday after- noon, the most seasoned commentators, who had been doing little other than canvassing MPs for five days, could be seen shrugging their shoul- ders and staring morose- ly into their cups of tea in the Press Gallery can- , teen. it was as if they were shell-shocked by the barrage of lies — and its accompanying smoke-screen of eva- sions — which they had encountered. Perhaps they should have taken the advice of one Gov- ernment minister who told me, 'There's no point in asking that lot what they think' ('that lot' being the undecided Tory MPs): 'most of them are such absolute shits.'
In the corridor outside Committee Room 12, the evasions, and no doubt the lies, continued. Most MPs, as they emerged from the room, refused to say which way they had voted; the expressions with which they reacted to this not un- reasonable question were either scandal- ised or prissy or merely whimsical. One knight of the shires confided that he had tossed a coin. Then, drawing one out of his pocket, he explained that if you were very lucky the coin would come down 'like this' — and stood it on its rim. Such was the spirit of childish yet self-important levity with which the fate of this party was sealed.
As the time for the announcement of the count drew near, the mood darkened. Some Conservative MPs, unable to squeeze through the 200-strong crowd which now packed the corridor, remained caught up in it like flies in a spider's web, the strain and worry now clearly visible on their faces. Also scattered through the crowd were Labour backbenchers who had come to gloat; Mr Benn was there, with a radio aerial apparently sprouting out of his anatomy as if he were beginning to evolve into a Dalek — all the better, presumably, to bring the good news from Westminster to the Socialist International.
When the result was announced there was a headlong dash to the telephones, and after the corridor had cleared a trickle of MPs flowed from the committee room, Heseltinians exultant but still somehow uncertain of what it was they had achieved, Thatcherites black-browed and harrum- phing, and in-betweeners looking as if they were only just beginning to grasp the enormity of the mess into which they had plunged their party.
Even now, that enormity is hard to calculate. The Conservative Party is more symbolising coin, may have more or less sleep-walked into it. But others had spent days calculating, as they thought, the best way to produce the solution of their choice: a result which would force Mrs Thatcher to stand down without giving outright victory to Mr Heseltine, thereby inviting some preferred third candidate (probably Mr Hurd) to take over the fight. If just four of these clever calculators — out of the total of 16 abstainers — had paused for a moment from spinning out their own eva- sive replies to questioners, and bothered to listen instead to Mrs Thatcher's plain statement that she would fight the second round if she won a majority on the first, a
large portion of the party's present misery could have been avoided.
Several times recently I have seen the parliamentary Tory Party described as the most sophisticated electorate in the world; on this occasion they displayed the extreme degree of stupidity which only the very sophisticated can attain to. The result turned on the decisions of a small number of MPs who thought they were engaged in some kind of tactical voting. But in the real world (in parliamentary by-elections, for example) tactical voting makes sense only against a background of reliable opinion polls, which enable the tactical voters to make assumptions about how all the others are going to vote. In this leadership con- test, opinion polls were conspicuous by their absence — by their impossibility, indeed. Too many of the voters were evading the questioners, or lying to them, for multifarious tactical reasons of their own.
When I say that opinion polls were conspicuous by their absence, I mean reliable polls of Tory MPs, of course. There was no shortage of surveys of public Opinion about the merits of the two candi- dates. On every 'Would you be more Willing to vote for. . . .' question, Mr Heseltine came out on top. This seems to have swayed several wavering MPs, com- forting them not only with the thought that they might save their own seats if they voted for him, but also with the feeling that in so voting they were expressing the will of the people — not just conducting their own Private palace coup to oust a nationally elected leader. Yet opinion polls of this kind are of very dubious value. I should be more willing to vote for' the Socialist Workers' Party if it were led by Mother Teresa — but I still wouldn't vote for it. And to ask people how they might vote in an election which may not come for another 18 months, while they have no idea what the campaign will be about when it does come, is a remote and dubious procedure. The only opinion polls which have any clear electoral meaning are the ones which are conducted during an actual election campaign. . Mr Heseltine himself is an opinion poll Junkie. Without a regular injection of cheering statistics, he grows lacklustre, lean and hungry. He is widely assumed to have spent large sums over the last four Years commissioning surveys, for his eyes only, of his own popularity. For the popu- larity of his policies he quotes chapter and verse — percentage and decimal point — fr.oin the latest polls. While Mrs Thatcher is a self-proclaimed populist, Mr Heseltine is a popularist, which is not quite the same thing. It is one of the ways in which he resembles the new-style Labour Party, a Conservative equivalent of Neil Kinnock and Peter Mandelson rolled into one. It is not the only resemblance, of course; and perhaps one should not accuse him of popularist opportunism in his economic policies, where he seems really to believe in many of the things that Mr John Smith believes in. (That similarity, by the way, is not a fanciful slur dreamed up by Mrs Thatcher last week; it had already been analysed in some detail by Peter Kellner in the Independent two days before, and by me in The Spectator eight months ago.) But as Labour drifts towards whatever the pollsters say are the most popular attitudes of the day on the economy and Europe, and as Mr Heseltine leans over towards the same median point on the graph, it becomes increasingly difficult to know how a Heseltine-led Conservative Party would set about attacking the Labour Party at the next general election. When Tory MPs look at Labour's lead in the opinion polls today, they can consider two possible methods of closing that gap at the next election: one is to expose the weak- ness of Labour's economic policies, and the other is to rely on the endless prolonga- tion of Mr Heseltine's charisma honey- moon with the electorate. They can choose one method or the other, but they cannot choose both. •
So long as any contest between two sides is fought by the light of opinion polls, a sort of centripetal force will operate, causing both sides to court the middle ground. A weaker version of this force has been at work even in the contest for the Tory leadership, with Mr Heseltine emphasising that he has been a good Thatcherite and Mrs Thatcher emphasising that she is a good European. Even now her strategists may be trying to find some dramatic expedient for cutting the ground under his feet: a promise to make far-reaching changes to the poll tax might ensure her the extra votes she needed, and could perhaps be dressed up by her as a sign of her new spirit of consensus-awareness. But the omens are against it — not only because the contest so far has made posi- tions more rigidly entrenched, but also because it is contrary to her nature to be so flighty.
So it looks as if the second round will be a more or less straight re-run of the first. It remains to be seen whether the Conserva- tive MPs can manage to cock it up again quite so spectacularly. The forces are still fairly evenly balanced: arm-twisting will be easier this time for Thatcher supporters, and hope-raising easier for Heseltinian ones. And there remains the ultimate illusion of the crack-brained would-be tac- tical voter, the idea that if enough MPs abstain this time, they can force a third ballot, in which their preferred candidate, Mr Hurd (the candidate unpreferred by the majority) could finally be floated into power by a transferable voting system which most MPs do not even begin to understand. At the time of writing, a few hours after the results of the first ballot were announced, I still think that unlikely. But then, I have the advantage that since the news broke I have not yet had time to talk to more than a handful of Tory MPs.
'To think that here you are in my arms, yet less than an hour ago you were merely a tele- phone number amongst the graffiti.'
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