POLITICS

Mr Major's Government is drowning in dinner party soft-headedness

BRUCE ANDERSON

With less than a year to go before the general election, the Tory Party has only just decided on its plan of attack against Labour and Tony Blair. This is partly due to incompetence: Conservative Central Office wasted the first two-thirds of this Parliament. But it is also due to the Labour leader's skill. He makes it hard for his opponents to get to grips with him; he makes it very hard for them to come between him and public opinion.

Tony Blair has a goal and an insight. He wants to be prime minister; he knows that the country he aspires to govern is deeply conservative. So he found the obvious solu- tion to make his Party appear as conserva- tive as possible. If the Tories adopt a popu- lar policy, he steals it; if they succeed in making a Labour policy unpopular, he abandons it.

He has one great advantage in all this; 17 years in opposition have tamed his Party. There are a few rebels; there is a much larger number who are uneasy, and only hope that Labour would be more radical in govern- ment than in opposition. But such characters will keep their unease to themselves, at least until after polling day; the vast majority of Labour MPs are determined to do nothing to sabotage Mr Blair's campaign.

This is a problem for the Tory high com- mand. In all previous contests with Labour, they could rely on a significant degree of assistance from Labour MPs: no longer. In its absence, some Tories began by claiming that Labour had not changed; that New Labour was a mere Mandelsonian cosmetic. That was unsustainable; there was too much evidence the other way. So the Tories switched tack, and tried to argue that even if Mr Blair had changed, much of his Party still retained its old instincts. That was a more promising line because it happens to be true. But there were two problems; in public at least, the instincts are muted, while Mr Blair seems to be in full control. Such control is much simpler in opposition than it would be in government, but that is not an easy point to convey to the voters.

So what else were the Tories to do? They could accuse Mr Blair of opportunism, and it is easy to justify that charge. Throughout his entire political career, he has been consistent only in ambition. The moment they cease to suit his purposes, he abandons programmes and principles as lightly as a snake sloughs off its old skin. It is impossible to know what, if anything, he believes, and the same is true of almost all his senior colleagues.

There is, moreover, a fundamental hypocrisy in his attack on the Tories. They have mishandled the country so appallingly for the past 17 years that he intends — to take over almost all their policies. They have left the public services in a rundown condition, which he will cure — by addi- tions or reallocations amounting to around 1 per cent of the current expenditure total, which is a shade over £300 billion.

It is all nonsense, the most cynical non- sense that has ever formed the basis of a British political programme, outdoing any- thing Harold Wilson ever attempted. But the Tories have two difficulties in counter- ing it. The first relates to finance. Few vot- ers understand billions or percentages. When Harriet Harman announces an addi- tional £100 million for patient care, to come from that most dubious of sources, efficiency savings, the correct response is: 'Hold on a minute. The NHS currently spends £41 billion a year. How could you solve its problems with a mere £100 mil- lion: an extra quarter of 1 per cent?' But the noughts on large totals make most peo- ple's brains blur. New Labour calculates that even if its public expenditure plans lack credibility, the voters lack arithmetic.

The Tories' second problem is even more basic. If it tells the voters that Mr Blair does not stand for anything, they will reply: 'Which politician does? What does Mr Major stand for? Anyway, young Blair seems a nice chap, and it's time for a change.' If the voters are told that Mr Blair is stealing Tory policies, they will be undeterred. Many of them only want old policies and new faces: Whig men and Tory measures.

In all this, the Tories are wrestling unsuc- cessfully with middle-class soft-headedness. It is impossible to go to a dinner party these days without being told that the coun- try became too greedy and selfish in the 1980s, so maybe we need a Blair govern- ment. Even assuming them to be correct about the Eighties, one enquires, how would Mr Blair sort things out? No clear answer emerges; there is a vague belief that the rich, who, curiously enough, are always defined as being somewhat richer than one's interlocutor, should pay a small amount of extra tax, while the government adopts a more communitarian rhetoric.

It is extraordinary how otherwise intelli- gent people can indulge in such muddled thinking. They talk as if all the problems of government — in which they include most of the discontents of the human condition could be solved by a trifling tax increase for the very rich and an endless supply of ethical platitudes from Mr Blair. But this lack of realism is the Tories' main obstacle to re- election — and to expounding the most effective critique of a Blair government.

That would run as follows: 'We have been in power for the past 17 years, com- mitted to controlling and curbing public spending. Yet it has risen. We have been consistently hostile to Euro-federalism. Yet it has gained ground. We want higher stan- dards in education. Yet public service unions such as the National Union of Teachers continue to frustrate our endeav- ours. We have also had difficulties with tax and inflation.

'You say, dear voters, that this proves what you have come to suspect: that we are not only boobies, but time-expired boobies. Now that nice Mr Blair has committed him- self to all those formerly Tory goals, it is time to take the torch from our nerveless fingers and hand it to him.

'You are wrong. It proves nothing of the kind. Our difficulties merely demonstrate how appallingly difficult it is to run a govern- ment. Our ministers have lacked neither abil- ity nor willpower; even if you don't accept that John Major has willpower — and you'd be wrong — you surely wouldn't say that of Margaret Thatcher, and yet she found the same problems similarly insoluble.

'Even a government committed to those objectives from the depths of its political soul could not secure them. What chance would a Blair government have, when those of its members who did believe anything would certainly not believe in cutting spending or rebutting the NUT? These Blairite postures are only manifesto-deep, and would not survive one week of the real pressures of government. They would then be replaced by something much nearer to Old Labour.'

That is the language which intelligent Tory ministers use in private, but few of them believe that the voters would respond; Bald- win's 'appalling frankness' was not an elec- toral tactic, but a post-election confession. Yet the Tories will have to project more or less that message, or their prospects will drown in dinner-party sentimentalising.