Political commentary

The mantle of Macleod

Ferdinand Mount

Modes mostly think that politics, like the I art of biography, is about chaps. Talk about politics as if it offered alternative maps of the world and you will be told not to be so dogmatic or doctrinaire. The history of geography, as written by a British Conservative, would start like a Ladybird book for grown-ups: 'Ptolemy the Geographer was a wonderful chap, bit of a wild man in his youth, you know, the Greeks loved his Egyptian accent, he had all the charms of a good colonial type, you could say he was a Smuts of the Nile.'

This distaste for theory is commonly defended as the mark of a practical man who adjusts to circumstances. And it certainly has its attractions when compared to the oposite extreme of all theory and no people. Yet it contains a dogmatism which is the more treacherous because the Tory refuses to admit to the map he carries in his head. For instance, Sir Ian Gilmour, in his denunciation of the blind dogmatism of Thatcherism, declared at Blackpool: 'A reversal of these policies will lead in time to a recovery in output and employment without increasing inflation.. there is scant danger of labour scarcity renewing wage inflation. . that moderate fall in the exchange rate would not have severe inflationary consequences. . the Government should as a deliberate act of policy reduce interest rates.. interest rates at present level are not necessary.'

All this may or may not be true. But it is scarcely undogmatic. In fact the confidence of it fair takes your breath away. How amazingly quickly Keynes's popularity confirmed his own maxim that so-called practical men are in reality the slaves of some defunct economist.

Yet, like other Tory dissidents, it is not the memory of Keynes — a mere boffin and a Liberal anyway — that Sir Ian draws on to support his critique of Mrs Thatcher but on Great Dead Conservatives and their Great Sayings. You are left with the impression that neo-Keynesian demand management was invented by a consortium of Lord Salisbury, Burke and Disraeli.

Mrs Thatcher is not only callous (Mr Stevas), incompetent (everybody), heading for the rocks (Sir I. Gilmour), she is a Whig (Mr Heath). She lacks the balanced view of the national interest, she fails to understand the compact between the living and the dead; above all, she is not like Disraeli.

Now it's quite easy for Prime Ministers, and lesser ministers too, to be like Disraeli. As Wilde might have said, Norman St John Stevas is a cutprice Disraeli and so was Disraeli. In fact, we have found ourselves constantly being governed by Dizzy types over the past 30 years. You have only to think of their beguiling gestures, their nimble sideskips when faced with serious questions, the contrast between the shallowness of their analysis and the largeness of their rhetoric. Mr Macmillan was Dizzy in a cardigan, Sir Harold Wilson, Dizzy in Gannex.

The blow dealt by Lord Blake's biography seemed fatal at the time. Unfortunately, charm, even of the most camp, exotic kind — perhaps particularly of that sort — seems to be indelible. And in his much applauded oration at Blackpool Mr Michael Heseltine was back at the old stand: 'It required great courage when Disraeli first talked of one nation. It did not represent a conventional view of the time. It flew in the teeth of much that was contemporary experience.' Up to a point.

'Disraeli — one nation' is now wellestablished as pidgin-Tory for 'Thatcher — no-good'. And Mr Heseltine was considered to have finally joined the dissidents by adding to it the rapidly growing codephrase for revolt: 'lain-Macleod-was-adeeply-controversial-politician.'

Three out of this journal's eight editors over the past 25 years are now highly symbolic figures in the Tory Party's internal war. This must be some kind of a record for a weekly journal, even one that has clocked up 8,000 numbers. Sir Ian and Mr Nigel Lawson hammer it out on the floor while the mantle of lain Macleod flutters overhead.

In the Heseltine version, Macleod 'fought against bitter criticism to keep us close to those same traditions of compassion and tolerance.' Certainly, the bitterness of the criticism was real enough. I remember being as startled by the extent of the dislike for Macleod among leading Conservatives of the time as I was thrilled by the harsh resonance of his speech-making, with a command of pace, pitch and volume I have not seen equalled since. His reputation as a radical was made as Colonial Secretary — even if his speeding up of the pace of decolonisation was not quite as dramatic as both supporters and critics claimed. It suited both sides to take it for granted that his too-clever-by-halfness was enlisted solely, at home and abroad, in the interests of opposing racialism.

Yet I am not quite prepared to see my only recent political hero dragged in so unequivocally on the side of the wets. Macleod died too soon to show us what kind of a Chancellor he would have become. The bridge champion and habitué of White's and the paddock might suggest a free-spending, go-for-growth, style; the Scottish doctor's son and collaborator of Enoch Powell might have made a cannier Chancellor. As Shadow Chancellor, he conspicuously refrained from condemning the caution of Roy Jenkins's sound-money Budget of 1970. And in his only Commons speech as Chancellor, a fortnight before he died, he said 'it would be premature at this moment to stimulate demand', echoed Mr Jenkins's belief that fiscal and monetary policies were more effective if they worked in harmony, and declared that 'the prospect before us still requires reasonably tight monetary conditions' and that the existing plans for public expenditure were unacceptably high and, unless sharply reduced, would have to be paid for by higher taxes.

you can't help thinking that Macleod's death must have had something to do with the feverish change in atmosphere and the unimpeded surge of growthmanship that followed. The first Heath-Barber Budget was expansionary enough. The second, in 1972, was proudly declared by Lord Barber to give 'a larger stimulus to demand than has been given by any Budget.' By then, even Mr Jenkins was egging him on and admitting that, with hindsight, he should have been bolder and started reflation in the autumn of 1969.

Disraeli for his part was an austere Chancellor, even more anxious to balance his Budgets than his contemporaries. I wonder what he would have said about calls for 'non-inflationary reflation.' What would he have thought of the Queen's Speech, and in particular of Mr Tebbit's Trade Union Bill — the only enthusiasm of Mrs Thatcher's which is shared by many of her critics? Not much, I fear. It was, after all, his government's 1875 Acts which decriminalised breach of contract and legalised picketing. Dizzy told Lady Chesterfield that the legislation 'will gain and retain for the Conservatives the lasting affection of the working class'. You can see to this day how grateful they are.

I think the dead have enough troubles without being dragged in to prop up the living. It would be ludicrous to pretend either that Mrs Thatcher is a Macleod reborn or that Macleod himself was immune to the illusions of his age. That most famous single issue of the Spectator, the one containing Macleod's inside account of the struggle to succeed Macmillan, also contains a leading article demanding a nationalised and more motorised police force — the two qualities which, 17 years later, are generally held to have alienated the police from the public.

But the real cleavage now ripping the Conservative Party apart does, I think, concern the past. It is between those who believe that, on the whole, we have been quite well governed over the past quarter of a century and those who believe that we have been badly governed, that, as a result, we are now facing prospects and decisions which are far nastier than they need have been, and that, this time, we must not try to dodge or fudge our way out of them. The change is between the Contents and the Not-Contents. And I find it hard to believe that lain Macleod would have been on the side of the Contents.