POLITICS
Steel so sharp he might cut himself
FE RDINAND MOUNT
During the debate on the Queen's Speech, the Liberal leader alerted us to what sounded like a new form of social disadvantage. Mr Steel warned that 'if the run-down city areas are not to become the permanent sink of the affluent society, whose victims live shut away from the gays of the prosperous suburbs and the shires, except when they explode in resentment, what is needed is help and enablement'. Only the Liberals have had the compassion to understand the bitterness and frustra- tion caused by the growth of a Two-Nation society. While country and suburban gays frolic at their tennis clubs and gymkhanas, the inner cities are, it seems, condemned to a grim future as a heterosexist underclass. `Gay deprivation riots' will soon be com- monplace on Merseyside, and in Greater Manchester social workers must be bracing themselves for new demands for Lesbian Access. Yet this urgent social problem is in danger of going totally ignored in the comfortable South, for, as usual, most MPs had fled the Chamber the moment Mr Steel began to speak, and Hansard even printed 'gays' as 'gaze'.
For those outside in the wider commun- ity, it may be hard to understand how little attention the House of Commons pays to Mr Steel or indeed to any of the Liberals. Now that Chancellor Jenkins is no longer with us, on the Alliance benches it is Dr Owen. and only Dr Owen who commands attention. This is not because he is a brilliant speaker, though he is much im- proved, but because he appears somehow to engage with the politics of the day. Mr Steel, by contrast, embodies the irrele- vance of the modem Liberal Party, its obsession with the issues of the 1960s, its lack of economic realism. None of this matters much on television, where his affable blandness is an asset. Nor is it a drawback in Liberal Party infighting, where his Lowland cunning always pops up when least expected.
This time, though, he has been so sharp I think he might cut himself. In theory, I suppose, Mr Steel does have the right to raise the question of merger without con- sulting Dr Owen, since it was he who originally hatched the idea of the Social Democratic Party in cahoots with Roy Jenkins. They had both always intended an eventual merger, and they could well argue that by now, to quote the Alliance's bathetic election slogan, The Time Has Come'. From his own career point of view, by raising the question so briskly after the election Mr Steel has both scotched any challenge from Paddy Ashdown to the leadership of his own party and much improved his chances of leading a merged party. Not bad for a man widely supposed to be suffering from post-campaign fatigue. But it is a crude and counter-productive move, all the same. He knew not only Dr Owen's hostility to merger but also his prickliness and dislike of being bounced. The whole thing could have been managed much more gently. Above all, Mr Steel is wrong in regarding merger as a Grade-A priority. For most voters, it comes about 237th on the list of important questions. The two-headed monster was a disadvan- tage during the election, but not nearly such a disadvantage as having to confront two big parties in reasonable fettle. Mr Steel had, I suspect, built up unrealistic expectations on the basis of Michael Foot's 1983 campaign — a disaster without paral- lel in half a century. I really do not think the electorate would make much distinc- tion between a totally merged party and an alliance of two parties with a single head and a single shadow cabinet and manifesto- making body. How far down the structure the merger reaches is really a matter of indifference to the outside world.
The public squabbling does matter, though. The media have been extremely kind to the Alliance so far, making very little of the scorn and derision most of its leaders continually express for one another. Perhaps it is the strain of being nice in public that makes. them so obses- sively vituperative in private. Now the slanging is out in the open. And David Owen's views about the Liberal Party as a whole seem to be even more contemptuous than his feelings about David Steel.
I find this arrogance unappealing. After all, the Liberal Assembly at Eastbourne was merely following his own refusal to `fudge and mudge' on the Bomb — only in the opposite direction. Mr Steel has been slowly leading them away from their princi- ples towards his. Just because they dig their heels in a few yards from the finish, there is no cause to deluge them with abuse.
Besides, Social Democrats and Liberals enjoy telling the rest of us how insular we are. In other countries, government is carried on very successfully, they say, by all sorts of coalitions and alliances of parties. The point is that the precise mechanics to merge or not to merge, for example — are irrelevant. What matters is the spirit of co-operation. That is what breaks the mould. And that is just the quality which has been conspicuous by its absence in the present imbroglio. Both Dr Owen and Mr Steel have been playing what they would normally condemn as 'the old politics'.
We have all praised Dr Owen for shed- ding some of his vanity and overbearing manner since the days when he seemed so overinomoted at the Foreign Office. Yet as a party leader he has remained curiously one-dimensional. He seems unable to understand the uses of the Liberals, or how complementary the two halves of the Alliance could be. The SDP has the managers and the money; the Liberals have the enthusiasts and the membership (although their estimated members of 100,000 may not turn out in any contest to be as solid as the SDP's computer-based 60,000). Most Liberals are friendly souls, easily wooed with a kind word. No doubt it was Dr Owen's backbone that stiffened them throughout the Falklands War and the miners' strike. But people do not like being continually told they have been stiffened. In any case, many prefer life as invertebrates. Dr Owen's formula of `tough but tender' could with advantage be applied to the management of the Alliance.
True, life inside the Liberal Party on its own was not always milk-and-watery. The last contest for the Liberal leadership, in 1976, was an uproarious affair. The loser, John Pardoe, claimed that Mr Steel had conducted 'a carefully orchestrated charac- ter assassination campaign with the help of the press', including, according to some accounts, the allegation that Mr Pardoe wore a toupee. Cyril Smith declared that Mr Steel could not make a bang if he had a firework in each hand. Mr Smith and Mr Steel still sit side by side, sometimes, and Mr Pardoe re-emerged last month as the frustrated co-ordinator of the Alliance's election campaign. If he is wearing a toupee these days, it is a very grey one.
The whole business may yet blow over, and if it does not, it will be all their own silly fault. Who is most to blame? Six of one and half a dozen of the other, if you ask me.
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