Politics
Who's boxed in?
Charles Moore
As the Budget debate drew to its close on Monday, Mr Roy Jenkins praised Mr Edward Heath. Losing the Tory lead- ership might not have done much for Mr Heath's temper, he said, but it had done wonders for his political thinking. Mr Heath, he said, had changed, and had come to understand the truth about econo- mic policy. Mr Jenkins asked us to imagine Mrs Thatcher, similarly defeated, being so flexible. He declared it was impossible.
It is true that we have never seen Mrs Thatcher in defeat. Since she has been party leader for ten years, this invincibility maylconstitutel a:record \ for modern times. It is impossible to imagine her saying that she was wrong, reflecting philosophically on her defeats, smiling self-deprecatingly at her former declarations. She lacks the vanity of a Macmillan — so confident of his own charm that he can laugh off his shortcomings — or the humility of a Home. But however she ends up, it is hard to imagine her being as implacable, as unteachable, as savage as Mr Heath.
I do not intend to take up your time, as Cicero might have enjoyed saying, with descriptions of Mr Heath's strange and grandiose self-portrait. There is no need to mention, as Cicero might have continued, Mr Heath's view that he came into politics 'to prevent the Thirties being repeated over again' and that to him the discussion of political advantage on a great question like unemployment is 'not a major factor'. I leave aside his constant reassertion that a statutory pay policy was necessary in the early Seventies and is necessaryinow, that governments should borrow more, that they should give discriminatory regional aid and pour public money into 'infrastruc- ture'. I shall not deign to discuss his claims about ill-treatment, and how wicked it was of Mrs Thatcher to drink champagne when she beat Mr Whitelaw. You know all these things, patres conscripti. I only mention Mr Heath at all because he embodies the immobility which makes the Tory debate on economic policy rather unrewarding.
On Monday, Mr Heath described Mr Lawson as 'boxed in by his own beliefs'. This is amost exactly the wrong way round. The pound, the tax bill, the unemployed, the City box Mr Lawson in. It is only his beliefs that stop the box from closing over his head. They allow him to think of ways out, round, and on. Mr Heath, by contrast, speaks with all the heat and muffled anger of someone who has inadvertently shut himself inside a box and is too proud to ask anyone to help him out of it. And there are several others, all of them in boxes, though all of them less claustrophobic than Mr Heath's — Mr Francis Pym, Sir Ian Gil- mour, Mr James Prior.
The oddest thing about the men in boxes is that they think of themselves as open- minded. Mr Prior, in particular, who mutes his criticisms because he was treated less scurvily than his ousted colleagues, thinks that it is he who opposes `dogma'. He told the House of Commons that we must 'cast out dogma and do what we know to be right and commonsense and sound'. As long as Mr Prior goes on imagining that he is flexible and Mrs Thatcher is rigid, so long will Mrs Thatcher go on thinking that she is consistent and Mr Prior is wet. A government, said Mr Prior on Monday, 'has to weave and turn a bit more', and of course he flattered Mrs Thatcher's self- image by suggesting that weaving and turning were not for her. Yet he was speaking in a debate on a Budget which had weaved and turned quite as much, and possibly a bit more than was decent. Was it dogma that kept Mr Lawson clear of taxing pensions or spreading VAT? Is it the Government's fanatical devotion to reduc- ing the power of the state which has led it to increase taxes over the past six years?
With this sort of internal opposition, the Government finds its powers of self- criticism reduced. Mr Heath is so rude, so self-obsessed, so outrageously ungenerous that ministers begin to take pleasure in gainsaying him. During the Budget debate Messrs Lawson and Tebbit conspired together on the front bench throughout Mr Heath's speech, popping up with scornful, interjections, happy that they could feel, for the first time, free to break with the convention which respects the utterances of ex-Prime Ministers. The vehement cri- ticisms of the Government come from men who are disappointed and whose view of politics has refused to accomodate any event since 1972. They are bad preparation for future political challenges. Mr Heath and the other box-wallahs 'embarrass' the Government, but they do not make it think and so do not do it much good.
For the Government is not under the direct threat which some people now im- agine. Its difficulties, economic and politic- al, are nothing like as great as they were in the equivalent period of the last Parliament — the post-Budget gloom of Sir Geoffrey Howe's 1981 deflation. For a period such as this, the Government's showing in the opinion polls (still, on balance, in the lead) is unusually good. It has soundly, though expensively defeated a nasty attack on its authority. Most of the country is getting richer. Many of the questions which one suspects will prove most ticklish for it over the next two years — defence, for instance, and the Common Market — are not much discussed. Psephologists may be producing those clever extrapolations which show that current voting trends, projected into a general election, would give the Conserva- tives 47 seats, Labour 150 and the Alliance more than 400, or whatever, but politically there is no sign that Labour is recovering sharply or that, which is more surprising for this stage of Parliament, the Alliance is surging forward. Conservative MPs are not enjoying themselves, it is true. They are bored, and their constituents are irritable, but those who really fear for their seats are more or less confined to the people who never expected to get in last time. Mr Lawson's Budget invites them to wait for results. They do not like doing this, but they do still have the time to wait.
In fact, the present Conservative party in Parliament is really quite remarkable for its basic unanimity. Apart from the de- clared Wet faction, which cannot be more than 40 strong, Tory MPs support the Golernment's aims, and a high proportion of its detailed policies. Their form of opposition is not to raise great issues of principle but to drag their heels over reforms which their stated beliefs lead them to favour. Thus the extension of 'fiscal justice' (tax for all) is a Good Thing in general, but the removal of pension or mortgage interest tax relief is rather deli- cate. People should stand on their own two feet, but not, perhaps, people who have children collecting student grants and seats on the local constituency association. There is unity on the principle, division only on the extent to which the principle should be sacrificed to a self-interest. All this is quite unlike the latter days of the Heath government, when a large, articu- late section of Tory MPs found itself flatly opposed to most of what the Prime Minis- ter was trying to do.
It follows that the danger to this Govern- ment is not from those who want to undo what it has done, but from a loss of momentum leading to a loss of nerve and purpose. The Government lacks helpful critics on its backbenches, people who can lead it through the mazes of its own creation. On its front benches, it lacks people who can think in public about how to extend and fulfil its purposes. (Mr Tebbit is the exception.) When Parliament comes to argue in detail about restrictions to the labour market, even more when it discusses the structure of benefits and tax, there will be few Tory MPs who will want to repudiate the Government's ends, but many who will fight shy of the proposed means. Backbenches become nervous, spending rises, Mr Lawson produces still more careful and confined Budgets; Mrs Thatcher continues to speak of the great battle in which she is engaged, but her party begins to notice that she is not winning it. Then the Government will be boxed in, and it will be time for Mrs Thatcher to go the way of Mr Heath.
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