POLITICS
Why the Tories might prefer a more cynical government
BRUCE ANDERSON
Many Tory MPs are now in a thor- oughly gloomy frame of mind. This time last year, the same chaps were already extremely concerned about the way things were going, but then they still thought that something could be done about it, and were rolling up their sleeves to knock a bit of sense into the Cabinet. One said to me: `The most loyal service a loyal backben- cher can perform right now is to give this Government a loyal kick in the backside.' A year on, the attitude is much more defeatist, as if it were already too late to save the party from heavy losses at the next election.
The Tories' hope has always been that if they could only at last get the presentation of policy right, they would find that the voters were fundamentally in sympathy with what the Government was trying to do. Today, however, many are not so confident of that: they think that they detect two major shifts in public opinion, and they also fear that in one important respect the Government may have mis- judged the national mood all along. The shifts relate to the Prime Minister, and to compassion: it is believed that many of the public have become thoroughly, terminally fed up with Mrs Thatcher, whereas com- passion is now in vogue. The basic mis- judgment concerns Bernie Cornfeld's question, 'Do you sincerely want to be rich?' There is an increasing suspicion among Tories that the British people's answer to that would be 'not really'.
One should always be wary of gener- alisations about public opinion on the basis of election results. Our strange electoral system, under which quite small net move- ments in voting percentages have dramatic effects on the parties' fortunes, can give a false picture. Commentators and politi- cians tend to assume that any change of Government means that there has been a revolution in national sentiment, and to overstate the average voter's commitment to the party he is supporting. In fact most of the public's political allegiances are much more doubting and provisional, much more faute de mieux — and more faute than mieux — than the weight of interpretation placed upon them would suggest.
The Tories won the 1979 election, and lost. the 1964 election, so Mrs Thatcher's 43.9 per cent at the one was seen as a resounding endorsement of a populist appeal, whereas Sir Alec Douglas-Home's 43.4 per cent at the other was not. In 1983, Mrs Thatcher's populism was further en- dorsed — by 42.4 per cent of the vote. However, Mrs Thatcher has always been a paradoxical populist. She has the right background, but she has spent most of her life escaping from that background: popul- ism and elocution lessons don't normally go together. One suspects that the young Miss Roberts was taught to shun common children and, when on duty at the grocery counter, to turn a deaf ear to their parents' pleas for credit.
It would hardly have been surprising if she had formed a view of the working classes as idle, shiftless folk; after all, if they had been willing to work hard like the Robertses, they would have escaped from the working class. Then, in middle life, Mrs Thatcher discovered populism. Sud- denly the working classes were no longer scrounging socialists — they were village- Thatcherites, and with a little encourage- ment from her they would all end up us Volvo dealers in Harlesden.
Sadly for Britain, Alderman Roberts' view of his fellow countrymen proved more accurate than that of the gentlemen at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Hence to- day's Tory version of Ernie Bevin's de- spairing verdict that the buggers won't work: the buggers don't want to become small businessmen. This has led some ministers to conclude, not only that the party is in electoral trouble, but that the country is almost ungovernable.
It is certainly true that the Government has consistently overestimated the popu- larity of economic competitiveness. Com- petition is like incomes policy, very popu- lar when it applies to others: we and the nurses are special cases, all the rest are greedy so-and-sos. The services we use should be provided as cheaply and effi- ciently as possible but the services we sell are far too precious to be subjected to the rude demands of the market place. Indeed market-phobia is widespread in Britain. So inasmuch as Mrs Thatcher's Britain is a place for the striving, the sharp-elbowed, the upwardly mobile, and the successful, it risks scaring off a great number of the British.
A lot of the public want to be led, and looks to the government for protection. This does not mean that they wish to see a large increase in the power of the state, merely that their conception of the proper role of government includes a large mea- sure of paternalism. They will not be satisfied with anarchy plus the constable. In this respect, old-fashioned Tories were and are much wiser than the Thatch- erites. Traditionally, Tory politicians knew instinctively how things worked; they knew what made a good regiment, or a good club, a well-run estate or racing stable. They understood the role of leadership, and how to encourage the best from their workers. They were aware that, at least in peacetime, there is no point in making impossible demands, breeding only dis- couragement. Traditional Tories also knew that any government should normally be able to command a degree of deference from the public (indeed must do so if it is to be successful), and that the price of defer- ence is that the government should com- municate a vision of the country which makes people feel food. The reason why Mrs Thatcher's Government is doing badly in the polls, despite the economic recov- ery, is that at the moment very few people feel good about the country.
But old-fashioned Toryism had its faults, too. If it had not been for Thatcherism, would the unions and the nationalised industries have been tamed? Mrs Thatcher set out to deal with the ratchet effect, by which Labour governments always move the country to the left, while Conservatives maintain the status quo they inherit. In certain respects, particularly public spend- ing, she has not been very successful in doing so; but what would the position be if she hadn't tried so hard?
Both Thatcherism and traditional Tory- ism have the defects of their qualities. Perhaps what we need is a more cynical government. Unfortunately we have a gen- eration of Tory ministers who were put off the whole idea of politics by Harold Wil- son's restoration of the word politician to its Richard II meaning, 'that vile politician Bolingbroke'. This may explain Why, both under Mr Heath and Mrs Thatcher, the Tories have consistently talked tough and acted soft, fortiter in modo, suaviter in re, as if they felt that in all honesty they had to warn the voters about their plans — plans to which in fact they were not really committed, and which there was no chance of implementing anyway. The Government would be better advised to copy the approach that the Walrus and the Carpen- ter adopted towards the oysters: they went on getting oyster votes until quite a late stage in the proceedings.
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