CITY AND SUBURBAN

The Tories' necessary clever man finds his natural habitat

CHRISTOPHER FILDES

Says the Chancellor of the Exchequer: You see me in my natural habitat neither City nor suburban.' We are stand- ing outside Waitrose in the little Leicester- shire town of Blaby, where, assisted by Mrs Lawson and their King Charles spaniel Tigger, he is conducting what he calls a stationary walkabout.

Far away in the unnatural habitat of the City of London, the stockmarket is boiling. It is excited by a sequence of dazzling economic indicators — companies' new orders at their best for ten years, a record- breaking rise in the gold reserves, a healthy and unexpected surplus on the balance of Payments. The buyers put the figures together with the polls and bet on a Conservative victory. If they prove to be right, this time round, they should remem- ber whom to thank.

There is no triumphalism at Blaby, where the most significant indicator is Mr Lawson's tie. We have learned to read his code — the Garrick's salmon-and- cucumber stripes to signal aggression, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to reas- sure the back benches. Today's is a dark blue tie with pale blue foxes. Can this be the Fernie, which hunts in the Blaby division? No, it is the Leicestershire Coun- ty Cricket Club. Mr Lawson is reassuring his constituents. Tigger does it better. He is happy to canvass anyone except a bull terrier. Mrs Lawson credits him with six votes in a morning, if you count the response: 'Well, I suppose with a dog like that he can't be all bad.' Mr Lawson, though, does well - at once cheerful and serious, never conde- scending, always himself. Perhaps half- rural Leicestershire is his habitat, after all. It is, he says, the heart of England. It takes in a machine-tool firm which exports to Japan, and the headquarters of Next, the risen star of retailing, and a brand-new brewery which Mr Lawson was asked to open by sinking a ceremonial pint. 'They were very impressed by the speed at which I got it down.' It is a standing disproof of the North-South' assumption that prosper- ity stops at the M25.

Today he is face to face with his principal opponent, the Liberal (Labour, last time round, lost his deposit.) They share a paved courtyard, peaceably shaking hands with the voters and with each other. The Liberal is a friendly statistician with a professional distrust for the Chancellor's way with figures: 'I disagree with almost everything he says, but that's no reason for throwing rocks at each other.' In other habitats, Mr Lawson likes to get his rock- throwing in first.

He fields question after question on schools, and blames the big teaching un- ions. He autographs postcards for children, setting their teachers an example by check- ing that he has spelt their names right. Two cheerful young men sidle up in jeans: `Nigel, what about the licensing laws?' In the manifesto, says the candidate — must be made more realistic. Then a cheerless young man, without a job, who gets sympathy and statistics: 'The fastest- growing economy in the world.' Then a lad in a jersey to say: 'I've always wanted to meet someone like you — what have you got in store for us?' It is a startlingly broid question. 'What we've got in store,' Mr Lawson tells him, 'is a country which is respected in the world, and respected in the world because we're doing well.'

That is a good bold claim which the Conservatives have been slow to make. They let the campaign run for more than half its length without any sustained attempt to put the economy, or the Chan- cellor, in the front line.

Elections, I suggest to him, are some- times lost, and sometimes won. His party plainly relies on Labour to lose the elec- tion, on defence. But if the Conservatives set out to win the election, it could only be on the economy. Why have they said so little, or left it so late?

'I'm sure', Mr Lawson says, 'the eco- nomy is the reason why we started the campaign well ahead in the polls, and have remained so. People know that the eco- nomy is doing well. They have a sense of well-being going beyond their standard of living — they know the companies they work for are doing well. It's pervading the campaign and setting the mood.

'Everything else depends on a strong economy, and it's therefore so central that it has a bearing on people's views about the competence of the government of the day. What comes to the fore in an election is complaint and criticism. I can't recall an election where the opposition of the day has said less about the economy. They've got nothing to get any handle on.'

That, I observe, is not the way they were betting six months ago. 'Yes,' he says, 'it's very funny. Hattersley was going around saying, there's a sterling crisis on the way, a balance-of-payments crisis on the way, you just watch out.' He adds an uncom- plimentary judgment on Mr Hattersley's skill at picking winners.

This week Mr Lawson has been brought into the firing line. He has to combine it as best he can with such chores of office as preparing for the summit in Venice (I'll box and cox with the Prime Minister'). It is, as he cannot say, a showbiz occasion, but he has work to do there — on farm surpluses and protection, on currency stability, on black Africa's debt. The job never lets him go.

'It is', he says, 'a very demanding job indeed, but one I've enjoyed doing very much.' That, when he is on form, shows. I asked him why he had composed (or who had composed) such a dull Budget speech, so short of his usual surprise packets. No, it was his own composition, all on purpose: 'It had to be sound, and seen by the markets to be sound. It seemed to me that part of the formula had to be not hyping things up.' So reforms must wait for the new Parliament? His voice tires: 'At the beginning of a new Parliament is the least difficult time to do it.'

If the Conservatives control that new Parliament, what will they do for the minister who, more than any other depart- mental minister, can claim to have put them there? Will they cast honours at his feet, or offer him in due time the highest honour of all?

He has been their necessary clever man — like Lord Hailsham's father, back in the 1920s: 'a very clever fellow called Pig'. Theirs is, though, the party which does not warm to cleverness, the party whose here- ditary chieftain once stuck a colleague with the label 'Too clever by half'. He should not bet on their gratitude. It was a Tory of 250 years ago who defined gratitude in politics as a lively sense of favours to come.