Political commentary

The day of the Thatcherites

Ferdinand Mount

During all the commotion, Mr Michael Hese!tine, untouched by the hiring and firing, was back in Liverpool .opening something. This time it was a project to transform the derelict South Docks into the setting for the first-ever Garden Festival of Britain — to be held in 1984, and why not?

Think of it . . . Sissinghurst-on-theMersey — two miles of waterfront stretching from the Herculaneum Dock to Otterspool Promenade. The very names merge gigantic architectonic splendour with lost haunts of coot and hem. One pictiii-es something on the John Martin scale, an Upbeat version of the Fall of Babylon — great vistas of salvia and begonia looming out of the mist, gargantuan raised beds of mixed annuals bulging over colonnades of composition Cotswold stone. And all for a mere 10 million — to be recouped in no time by the angelic hosts streaming through the turnstiles and by re-letting the Percy Thrower Pavilion after the festival.

Now, in time past, such a project would have been met with cries of 'Groundnuts!' and 'Where's the money coming from then?' from the rougher element on the Conservative back benches. I happen to think that this project is altogether admirable and just the kind of thing the Chamberlains in their heyday would have leaped at for Birmingham. All the same, the estimates of cost and revenue do look a little shaky.

But there is an unnerving silence from the cheeseparers and skinflints. For the backwoods have been translated en bloc to the front bench. Birnam Wood was a small Job by comparison.

It was not until the second and more Junior list of appointments came out that the full sweep of Mrs Thatcher's reshuffle became apparent. For add Jock BruceGardyne and Nick Ridley to Nigel Lawson and Norman Tebbit and you have just about exhausted the Tory Right, excluding the bibulous, the illiterate and the otherwise unpresentable. In opposition, it was undoubtedly the last three who provided the Tory sting on the floor of the House of Commons. They met, they plotted, they wined and dined hacks, they went for Mr Callaghan's jugular — usually, it must be said, leaving that sturdy artery without a toothmark on it. In short, they associated themselves wholeheartedly with the cause of a leader who remained otherwise remarkably friendless. One of the few not particularly Thatcherite MPs who took the trouble to drop his leader a few kind words was Cecil Parkinson. He is a steady, modest chap who has the sense to see that being in favour of the free market does not involve regarding Mr Prior as Rasputin's understudy. And if that sounds like faint praise and sub-standard qualifications for a party chairman, I can only say you should see the others.

When Mrs Thatcher chose her first administration, it looked a little as if she was backing away from her more dubious old companions. Mr Ridley had been sent to look after the Falkland Islands to keep him out of trouble. Mr Bruce-Gardyne had been passed over. Mrs Thatcher seemed to spend a lot of time being charmed by members of White's Club. It looked like the Ramsay MacDonald story with the sexes reversed, Sir Ian Gilmour and Lord Carrington playing the part of Lady Londonderry on alternative nights.

All this now seems to have been a passing fancy. The bar in White's is full again. And the Thatcherites have entered into their own. It is as though, halfway through the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V had resurrected Falstaff to take command of a crack company of archers. Yet paradoxically, you have only to see the Thatcherites paraded in full to be reminded how few they are.

The reshuffle is indeed a show of will power. You could not ask for a more emphatic demonstration that Mrs Thatcher, unlike previous Prime Ministers, is not to be deflected from her course halfway through her term of office.

And yet. . . Let us go back to Mr Heath's U-turn in 1972. When that first great step towards corporatism, the Industry Bill, came before the House of Commons, there was not even a vote on second reading. Mr Bruce-Gardyne wanted to divide the House, but he could not find another member to act as a teller. On the second step, the Counter-Inflation (Temporary Provisions) Bill, not a single present Tory MP voted against the Bill, and only four abstained, including Bruce-Gardyne and John Biffen (who also spoke against the Bill along with Mr Ridley). Only one MP then sitting as a Tory both spoke and voted against the Bill — Enoch Powell.

Whole-hearted believers in the free market were and are pitifully scarce on the Tory benches. Now they are all in the Government. And they are just as much prisoners of collective responsibility as Sir Ian Gilmour and Mr St John Stevas were.

You can thus reverse all the conventional arguments about the first half of this Parliament and apply them to the second half. If Mrs Thatcher should wish to ease up and begin, very gently, to spread the public money around, then she could do so more easily with the defenders of stern unbending retrenchment silenced by office.

Now of course she has nothing of the sort in mind. Far from easing up, we are told, the Treasury will be a harder nut than ever this autumn. Huge new spending cuts will be necessary to get rid of the £5 billion overrun on this year's plans. Putting up interest rates by two per cent, to the dismay of most Conservatives, was scarcely a sign of softness. And I am delighted to see the Treasury strike early with a public sector cash limit which is hard and low — as frequently recommended in these columns.

All the same, public expenditure is not under control. And it will become increasingly tempting to defend the extra billions as justified to counterbalance the recession and revive employment. Already at the July Cabinet meeting Mr Biffen and Mr Nott were said to have taken a relaxed view of the overrun. The fact that the criticism of overspending will now come more from inside the Government is not always a guarantee that it will be sharper. Office is a great softener.

All this is not intended as a warning of Great Betrayal. It is dubious how much there really is to betray. Only the insularity of the dialogue prevents us from seeing that the overall performance of the British government is neither better nor worse than that of most other Western governments. Output and employment have dropped further here because our problems had been neglected for longer. Mrs Thatcher has been no more 'monetarist' or 'hardline' than most other Western leaders, certainly less so than Barre was in France or Reagan is now in the US.

What I find depressing is not our problems but the terms in which they are discussed. It is by no means physically impossible to reform the British labour market and run the economy so that output gradually recovers to its previous level. But one of the main obstacles is that our political rhetoric is so uniquely debased into a vulgar Keynesian patois.

Alas, it is the very mildness of our 20thcentury history, so long regarded as our greatest blessing and not without reason, which now constantly distorts and blurs the hard edges of decisions and events. Even the British slump of the 1930s was shorter and shallower than it was in many countries we are accustomed to think of as more fortunate, like the United States and France. As a result, what is here regarded as crackpot extremism is there regarded as common prudence. Is there an English equivalent of les belles economies?

The British appear to suffer from a kind of political dyslexia. Even this present slump seems to be having some difficulty in getting its message across. And by drawing into her Government the few remaining backbenchers who speak the language of scarcity and difficulty, Mrs Thatcher runs the risk that her Government will be caricatured as a sect of exclusive brethren. She may now find it easier to get her own way and perhaps easier to run the Government too, but converting the ungodly, let alone the Godley, seems to be rather more difficult.