POLITICS
Going nearly naked into the conference chamber
FERDINAND MOUNT
owards dusk, outside my window, a Salvation Army band strikes up 'Abide with Me', slow and draggy. A pleasurable melancholy steals upon this correspondent. As the hymn dies away, an elderly bands- man takes the microphone: 'Don't think just because we've got these uniforms we're privileged, we've got to earn the money to pay the rent, pay the rates and the electric same as you have. When we see this lovely weather, we don't just enjoy it, we hope it's going to last all winter long so we won't have to pay so much for our electric.' Fleeing this amplified whinge, I pass a man in specs sitting in a car. He is not looking at the sun setting over Beachy Head. He is reading a Home Office report on racial violence. Catching my eye, he raises his soft-drink can in smiling saluta- tion. One could identify him as a Liberal from as far away as the French coast. A Labour supporter would have given me a two-finger sign. A Conservative would have threatened to call the police.
At the beginning of the week, the fashionable view was that the Liberals are changed, changed utterly; a terrible solid- ity is born. As one august Liberal said, 'It's so nice that we've become hommes serieux.' Well, I'm not so sure. If you know where to look for them you can still find plenty of the half-amiable, half-querulous, rambling, gingery-wispy, lightweight Lib- erals of yesteryear.
It was also the fashionable view that the Liberals had benefited enormously from being licked into shape by Dr David Owen. Until this week, that was substantially what had happened, with Mr David Steel egging him on quite openly, not least because the Social Democrats hold their conference first, since there was no other time in the calendar to fit it in. The consequence is that these days the Liberals are faced with a huge great Alliance document, already approved by the SDP, which they have to swallow pretty well whole if they are not to be accused of wrecking the Alliance.
This is supposed to be frightfully benefi- cial and help them to grow up. Nobody dares to point out that all this new-found maturity does not seem to be doing them much good in the opinion polls. Liberals continue to do well in by-elections and local elections, SDP candidates rather less well. That can be partly explained by the SDP being allotted the more Labourish seats which are less ripe for picking at the moment. But it may also be because the SDP, being obsessed with gravitas, lack the cheerful unscrupulousness of the Liberals, as typified by Mr Des 'Pericles' Wilson, the party's incoming president, whose hugely applauded speech flung mud in all direc- tions in between quoting the old Athenian and Martin Luther. King. Mr Wilson, still- best known for running Shelter, has quite taken to politics. You will, I predict, be hearing a lot more of him, unless you emigrate fast enough.
Liberals still know how to whinge in a way that will suck in the softer, self-pitying type of discontent which appears to be sloshing in huge quantities around the country. The Social Democrats are unhap- py in this role. They prefer to concentrate on the nobler kind of discontent which believes in more overseas aid and a Bill of Rights. Hence their great tax plan, which is much too honest about the costs, some Liberals think. At least Mrs Shirley Wil- hams knows how to wow the Liberals. She told us on Monday afternoon, 'If the cost, of abolishing poverty is the cost of a packet of cigarettes for those earning over £17,000 a year, I hope you will feel it is a price worth paying.' You probably did not real- ise that poverty was so easy to get rid of; and the beauty of the scheme is that those earning under £17,000 a year can go on poisoning their lungs until Dr Owen has outlawed smoking (which seems to come quite close behind proportional repre- sentation in his priorities).
Mr Steel is very keen on all this. Few party leaders love their own parties, but even fewer can have had quite so little sympathy with their activities as he. In a remarkably candid interview in Marxism Today, Gaitskell comes across as Steel's real hero, and his only reason for not joining the Labour Party was that the Gaitskellites were losing: 'I didn't see much joy in joining an organisation where one would be quite clearly in the minority element.'
Indeed, his pre-SDP conversations with Mr Roy Jenkins were intended to invent a party which he could feel at home in. It should be said that Mr Steel's version of the founding of the SDP is hotly disputed by the David Owen camp, who insist that Mr Jenkins was quite out of things at the time and that it was Dr Owen, Mrs Williams and Mr Rodgers who were the true and onlie begetters and Mrs Williams dithered about it and so did Mr Rodgers, so, if you come down to it. . . .
Mr Steel's minders thought he had been too explicitly pro-Bomb last week and were dreading the Doctor's visit here. In the event, Dr Owen gave a very factual, lucid address on the progress of the various arms control negotiations. This gave no offence and was beautifully timed in view of the signing of the Stockholm Accords. The logic of his discourse, which was that one negotiates successfully only from strength, does not point in the direction of scaling down our nuclear forces to a bare `European minimum' — going as naked into the conference chamber as decency permits, reminding me inescapably of the skimpy bathing trunks which used to be sold in French beachwear shops under the label of le minimum.
This cache-sexe was rudely torn off the following afternoon. Rarely have I seen the platform at a party conference so utterly humiliated, not by the margin of its defeat — a mere 27 votes — but by utter intellectual annihilation. In all the subse- quent gloating over the Liberals having split the Alliance, it tends to be forgotten how disreputable the so-called European solution was. To link up with the French, who have never showed the slightest in- terest in disarmament, who have not even signed the non-proliferation and test-ban treaties, to call this a 'European' solution when West Germany, the principal power in Western Europe, is forbidden by treaty to participate . . . well, the phrase 'fudging and mudging' doesn't begin to cover it.
Even the hommes serieux who spoke up for Mr Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Richard Holme, sounded shifty and unconvinced by their own shifts. By contrast, the gingery- wispy lightweights — Michael Meadow- croft and Tony Greaves — spoke not only for the anti-nuclear ideals of traditional Liberals but also for logic and clarity.
The newspapers are universally con- vinced that the result was an unqualified disaster for the Alliance, just as they had been convinced that Mr Steel was bound to win the vote. Again, I am not so sure. Millions of voters don't like nuclear weapons and don't much care for the French either. The Liberals have not come as far as they have to ruin it all by offering a responsible alternative. Whingeing wins votes.
Previous page
