POLITICS
The ideal choice of leader for the 'No Notion' Conservatives
NOEL MALCOLM
The latest murmurings about a lead- ership challenge to Mrs Thatcher amount to very little; and they will amount to even less, I think, by the time nominations close. The bets are off until after the next election. Then, of course, when the ques- tion of the succession becomes a real issue at long last, everything will depend on the election results. Only if Mrs Thatcher both loses and comes thoroughly unstuck over Europe will Mr Heseltine have any chance of re-entering the race; otherwise he is doomed now to linger on as an Old Pretender, a Benn-like figure (if only in this respect), part of the stage scenery. If Mrs Thatcher wins, we can look forward to two or three years of personal rule, before she tries to ensure that the succession skips a political generation and passes to one of the bright young men she approves of — of whom John Major is evidently the front- runner. If she loses the election reasonably messily, those in the Party who want a change of style but not a complete change of policies will have a wider field of candidates to choose from — of whom John Major will also be one of the front- runners. How can this be?
Profile writers never fail to allude to the fact that Mr Major's father once worked as a trapeze artist in a circus. I am tempted to say that what Major fits most reminds me of is the daredevil circus rider who man- ages to bestride two cantering horses at once. But the imagination rebels against this comparison; for it would be hard to think of anyone less like a daredevil than Mr John Major.
He has got where he is today by being hard-working, clever, nice, efficient and dull. And the greatest of these (as a modern Conservative gospel might say) is dullness. It is a special kind of greyness and indistinction, not personal but political. His friends, of whom there are many among Tory MR, will assure you that he is not personally dull at all — even though some of the evidence they offer in support of this claim, such as his passion for opera, Chelsea Football Club and Surrey County Cricket Club, strikes me as indicating the very worst kind of dullness, the dullness of the enthusiast. But a personal identity of some sort can still be constructed out of enthusiasms. The thing that really matters about Mr Major is his lack of a political identity: what on earth does he stand for, politically? And the fact that there is no clear answer to this question must tell us something, in turn, about any party in which the lack of such a political identity is not merely no obstacle to an ascent to the top, but a positive advantage.
A rough sketch of Mr Major's views can be put together, with difficulty, if one is prepared to join up dots and leave many blank spaces. The resulting picture is cer- tainly not that of an identikit Thatcherite. When an interviewer from the Financial Times this week summed up his position as `economically dry and socially wet', he grudgingly and unhelpfully acknowledged it as a 'fairish' description. Though he is a believer in free-market principles in econo- mic affairs, his reputation for 'dryness' was acquired unavoidably during his stint as Chief Secretary to the Treasury — the minister whose job it is to cut down other people's claims for more public spending. While Mr Lamont has performed that role to general satisfaction this year, he has not come under any doctrinal pressure from his boss, Mr Major, who blithely admitted in his Mansion House speech a fortnight ago that the budget would not balance and that public spending as a proportion of GDP would no longer fall.
In the eyes of some observers, including Mrs Thatcher, the aura of dryness which Mr Major projected as a Treasury minister has extended beyond economic affairs. The fact that his PPS, Tony Favell (who resigned last month in protest at the decision to enter the ERM), was a member of the right-wing 'No Turning Back' group, encouraged this impression, even though it is quite common for ministers to choose PPSs who complement rather than dupli- cate their own views. Again, in Mrs Thatcher's eyes he has the advantage of not having been part of the Heathite party machine. But the groupuscule which he has been a member of is the 'Blue Chip' dining club, where the youngest and cleverest of the Heath protdges (Chris Patten, William Waldegrave) are to be found.
John Major is certainly no visceral Right-winger. He has voted against hang- ing and made speeches against `racism'; and in 1978 he came out publicly against what one might call neo-visceral Conser- vatism, when he urged the Tory Party to `secure the consent and approval' of the electorate by `rational argument', instead
of the 'ranting and unreason' of recent converts such as Mr Paul Johnson. Mr Major once confided to a friend (and it is typical of the man that he should try to make a confidence out of such a thing) that his political hero was Iain Macleod. No doubt we should follow this tip, and try to locate Mr Major's views among the rather hazy ideals of the 'One Nation' Tories of the 1960s, which so inspired him in his early career as chairman of the Brixton Young Conservatives; but the resembl- ances between Mr Major, the cautious banker, and Mr Macleod, the maverick intellectual, are not so very great. If one had to pick an equivalent to Mr Major among the 'One Nation' MPs of the 1960s, it would surely be Mr Heath — the uncomplaining Stakhanovite who got to the top not by waging ideological warfare (that came later) but just by making himself indispensably useful.
The 'One Nation' group expressed an attitude rather than an ideology. Looking back, one can hardly avoid giving a sociological explanation of it: it was an outsiders' club, consisting mainly of people who felt excluded by the 'charmed circles' of the old Conservative hierarchy. This made them more meritocratic, but they also cleverly outbid the old guard of the Party by claiming to represent an older strand of Toryism, which cared for the unity of the whole social fabric. The result was a mixture of paternalism and egalitar- ianism which could mean almost anything in theory, and which in practice meant an increasingly corporatist approach to man- aging the mixed economy and the welfare state. Those 'One Nation'-ites who had real ideological instincts — above all, Mr Enoch Powell — went their separate ways. Eventually, all that the 'One Nation' label indicated was an imitation, a simulacrum of a strong set of beliefs on the part of those who did not have them.
Which, more or less, is where we came in. The appeal of Mr Major is that, as a highly competent technocrat, he always gives you the reassuring sense that he knows what he is doing. He may indeed know what he is doing; but does he know why he is doing it? That a man whose political beliefs are so obscure and ecto- plasmic can be touted so widely as a future leader suggests a party which no longer even cares to know where it is going.
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