POLITICS
Is it a bird? Is it a sheep?
No — it's Superhowe
NOEL MALCOLM
I'm no yes-man', said the young Geof- frey Howe in his 1959 election address. `The most important quality in Britain's next generation of politicians should be honesty — ruthlessly realistic intellectual honesty. Too many politicians have be- come accustomed to wearing a quite diffe- rent face in public from that which they wear in private. Too many have adopted an attitude of resigned helplessness in the face of a party policy which they dislike.'
From the way Sir Geoffrey has been written about during the last ten days, you would think that that 30-year-old promise had at last been fulfilled. The worm has turned; the yes-man has started to say no. Away with resigned helplessness — Sir Geoffrey has made a stand. The bumbling, mild-mannered, bespectacled Clark Kent of politics has retreated into a phone box, and after a few awkward calls to 10 Downing Street last Monday he has re- emerged as Superhowe in a splendour of scarlet and blue.
The facts, however, are rather different. The poor man was given a shock. Mrs Thatcher's failure to give such a close colleague any inkling in advance of the changes which she had in mind was insensi- tive, and she deserves some blame for this. But from then on his actions were gov- erned by a mixture of wounded pride and ambition. Both of these are understand- able human feelings in a politician, but neither of them really deserves to be dressed up as fundamental principles.
Nor could they decently excuse the amount of damage which Sir Geoffrey went on to inflict on the Government with his revelations (instantly communicated to the press by `sources close to Sir Geoffrey') about the haggling which had gone on between him and the Prime Minister. On Monday evening, when the bare details of the reshuffle were known, the Government was looking brighter and better than it had done for many months. By Wednesday morning, when the ex-Foreign Secretary's disclosures were in all the newspapers, the Government was looking more shaken and shambolic than it had done for years. Making trouble on this scale may be a good way for Sir Geoffrey to stake out his claim to the future leadership of the party, and begin the long process of `detaching' him- self from Mrs Thatcher in the public's eye; but it is a poor way to embark on the deputy premiership, a job which depends for its importance not on its constitutional powers but on the holder's special rela- tionship of trust with the Prime Minister.
Anyone interested in the processes by which political mythology is formed should spend the next six months or so looking very carefully at the re-modelling of Sir Geoffrey Howe. Some of the sketchy outlines of his new image have already become visible in the comments of the last few days. The new model Howe is a symbol of `consensus', and therefore, apparently, of a more caring, old- fashioned Conservatism; and he stands for a return to traditional Cabinet govern- ment, with real decisions about policy being made collectively .
It is difficult to give any reason why anyone should believe this nonsense, ex- cept for the obvious one that Sir Geoffrey speaks rather softly and looks like the sort of person who wants people to agree politely with one another. Consensus as mere manner may be part of his stock-in- trade, but it has never been at the heart of his political philosophy. He was a Thatch- erite a long time avant la lettre, devoted in the 1950s and 1960s to overturning all the Butskellite orthodoxies and bringing harsh market forces to bear on areas such as housing, education and health. Mrs Thatcher's first unpopular action as a minister, the abolition of universal free milk for schoolchildren in 1970, had first been proposed nine years earlier in a pamphlet written by the younger Geoffrey Howe — a pamphlet which also com- mended education vouchers, charges for state schools, contracting out of the NHS and, overall, `a large reduction of the public social services'.
When Sir Geoffrey is put forward as an apostle of consensus, what this mainly means is that he dislikes being over-ruled. Like many such consensus-lovers, there- fore, he is quite happy to over-rule other people. His conduct as Chancellor during Mrs Thatcher's first term was a classic example of a conviction politician sticking stubbornly — heroically, even -- to his guns, despite the opposition of 364 eco- nomists and almost as many Tory back- benchers. I do not put forward the word `heroically' with any sarcasm here: his abolition of exchange controls, for exam- ple, which took exceptional courage.
But the great irony of all this week's talk about restoring old-fashioned Cabinet gov- ernment is that it was the need to push through Sir Geoffrey's economic policies which made Mrs Thatcher resolve in the first place to transfer key decision-making processes to small Cabinet committees. Crucial decisions such as the abolition of exchange controls were deliberated not in the full Cabinet but in an inner committee of a cabinet committee. This was partly for reasons of secrecy, but mainly because the full Cabinet never contained a majority of believers in the relevant economic doc- trines. And after a while it was not only economic issues which got this treatment. The biggest presentational blunder of the second Thatcher term, the instant banning of trade unions at GCHQ, was decided by a small caucus of ministers (led by the Prime Minister •and Sir Geoffrey) and presented to the Cabinet as a fait accompli. As Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey was the minister responsible for GCHQ, and short- ly afterwards, he blithely remarked that `there are very few discussions of govern- ment decisions by full Cabinet' — as if he were, stating an obvious and unobjection- able truth.
`Too many politicians have become accustomed to wearing a quite different face in public from that which they wear in private. Too may have adopted an attitude of resigned helplessness in the face of a party policy which they dislike.' The popu- lar idea, boosted by sources close to Sir Geoffrey, is that our former Foreign Secretary has finally revealed his private misgivings about the policies and method of government which he dislikes. The truth is almost exactly the other way round. There are few people in this Government whose private beliefs are more perfectly attuned to the broad range of its domestic policies, or more responsible for the methods of decision-making which. it has evolved. What Sir Geoffrey and his band of well-wishers are now engaged in is creating a public face which is deceptively different from his private one. Seldom, perhaps, has a wolf been dressed so artfully in dead sheep's clothing.
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