POLITICS
Mr Major offers us blood, toil, adverbs and small print
NOEL MALCOLM
In theory, a great war makes us forget about our own narrow interests: in prac- tice, the opposite happens. Pork-belly traders talk obsessively about the effects of the war on pork-belly futures, ornitholog- ists write letters to the newspapers about the effects of the war on bird migrations in the Middle East, double-glazing salesmen worry about the effects on double-glazing.
It's the same in politics — except that it is considered politic not to talk about such things. But among MPs interest in the political consequences of the war is in- tense. The first concern, of course, is the standing of the party leaders. Here every- one seems to be doing well, some more deservedly than others. Mr Kinnock gave a good ministerial broadcast, clothed in gra- vitas and a dark suit, and the shameless opportunism of the position he adopted on the eve of the conflict seems to have dropped painlessly out of sight and out of mind. He has stored away his opportunism in a hardened bunker (Mr Gerald Kauf- man), waiting to bring it out again when things go wrong. Mr Ashdown has had a good war, sticking intelligently to the main issues in debate, and neither overplaying nor concealing his own military back- ground. The highest praise I can give him is to say that he has made his party look, for the moment, like a party which Dr Owen would not be ashamed to join.
And Mr Major? There is pride mingled with genuine surprise on his own back benches, not only at how well he has managed so far, but also at how unani- mously the press has hailed his perform- ance. We are told on the one hand that he has acquired a new aura of authority, and on the other that he has wisely chosen not to be a charismatic war leader such as Churchill. Well, if that is what everyone is saying and believing, that is the political reality. It goes to show how far political reality can stray from reality tout court.
Praising Mr Major for his wise decision not to be like Churchill is, I think, as fatuous as praising him for his wise deci- sion not to sing at Covent Garden or pilot a Tornado jet. So far as I can see, the manner of his performance has not changed ',since he was announcing minor alteration's to social security legislation for the simple reason that that is the only way he knows how to perform. Those who say he has carefully avoided the use of stirring eloquence, because he thinks it is not fitting in the circumstances, must ask themselves what he would sound like if he thought the circumstances did demand it. And the answer is surely: exactly the same.
It's not just that he isn't very good at being oratorical: the poor fellow has almost no inkling of what oratory is. His attempts to be emphatic result either in redundancy or in a sort of reinforced, multi-layered blandness. Asked about mis- sile attacks on Israel, he says they are 'unforgivable in every possible sense', which merely starts one wondering how many possible senses there mighebe. Com- menting on the parading of PoWs on Iraqi television, he says that such broadcasts are `wholly objectionable in every respect'. Asked whether it was necessary to start bombing Iraq, he says, 'Yes, it was neces- sary — absolutely, totally and completely necessary.' It's an idea of how to make an emphatic statement which one would get not from listening to orators but from studying the catch-all phrases in the small print of a hire-purchase agreement.
Otherwise, the praise Mr Major has gained from most quarters of the press concerns his determination to be nice towards everyone. He has been nice to Mr Kinnock, he has crossed the floor to shake hands with Mr Eric Heifer, he has even been nice to Mr Tam Dalyell. When given an opportunity to snipe at the BBC, he praised it instead; and when requested to explain President Mitterrand's stunning discourtesy in concealing the French peace proposals from him, he merely observed that M. Mitterrand was the person to ask about that. Only this Tuesday was he drawn out of his protective shell of nice- ness ever so slightly, when Mr Peter Viggers invited him to comment on the general uselessness of the EEC during the entire Gulf crisis. 'I entirely understand the point the Hon. Member is making. There is undoubtedly a considerable disparity between words and action . . . Political union and a common foreign policy would have to go beyond statements into action. The European Community is clearly not ready for that.'
With these words, the Prime Minister touched for the first time on what is probably the most important political con- sequence (for this country) of the Gulf war. It is a consequence which many Tory MPs are already discussing, though not too loudly for fear of seeming either to gloat or to open up old disagreements at a time of new unity. But while the pork-belly traders worry about their pork-belly futures, we should not be too surprised if some British politicians spend the war thinking about its effects on the future of Britain. And what they are thinking at the moment is that the plan to make Britain a province of a federal Europe has received as much of a setback as the plan to make Kuwait a province of Iraq.
One has only to look back at last year's debates on the creation of a single Euro- pean foreign and security policy, to see how things have changed. All that armchair geopolitics about making Europe into a new world power, which seemed so convincing in the padded armchairs of Brussels, now looks unreal. On my desk lie the Belgian government's proposals for the future of Europe, issued last March; they proclaim that the EEC must develop 'une capacite d'action exterieure efficace et coherente'. Next to them, by chance, lies a news report from last week, about the Belgian government's refusal even to sell ammunition to Britain for use in the Gulf.
But while the unreality of European 'political union' is now much clearer than it was, the same cannot be said of economic and monetary union. The proposals issued by Mr Lamont this month, which like everything else have been pushed off the front pages of our newspapers, contain some strangely open-ended phrases about the 'European Monetary Fund' (the body which would manage the hard ecu). The Fund, they say, would act as 'part of the progressive realisation of economic and monetary union'; it would 'undertake such additional tasks as the Council may de- cide', and so on.
The impression all this gives is that the Government will not mind if it is pushed further and further down the road to monetary union, now that it is confident that political union is a non-starter. It is a strange reversal of how things were on Mr Major's arrival at No 10. Then, most observers felt that while he had strong views on the monetary issues, he did not mind about the political dimension. So it the Government's position has changed, it is a change which does not inspire confi- dence. It would be preferable to think that the Prime Minister, rather than the Gulf war, was fully responsible for British policy on these issues.
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