CONSERVATIVE HEARTY

Andrew Gimson says that the true

Tory traditionalist in this race is Ken Clarke, not kin Duncan Smith

WHEN lain Duncan Smith said on Sunday that the Conservative party might need to reconsider its opposition to Clause 28, a Guardian-reading woman of my acquaintance responded, 'I thought he was a rightwing nerd, but he's starting to look like an opportunistic right-wing nerd.' This may be unfair of her, but it indicates the sort of difficulties Mr Duncan Smith can expect as he tries, in the painting-by-numbers style already used with minimal success by a number of Margaret Thatcher's other admirers, to widen his appeal by saying what he thinks liberal-minded voters want to hear. There are various reasons why Mr Duncan Smith is foolish to try to increase his popularity by such means. It makes him sound insincere and ingratiating, but, worse than that, it gives the impression that he seeks salvation for the Conservative party by turning it into a second-rate version of the Liberal Democrats.

The English are a generally conservative people. So too, with variations, are the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots. This conservatism cannot be reduced, without missing the point of it, to an ideology or a political programme. It may manifest itself in such diverse forms as love of the National Health Service or love of Durham Cathedral, but it is more a matter of temperament, tone of voice, attachment to existing ways of doing things, hatred of jacks-in-office. It may countenance the most astonishing changes, but is happiest if these can he regarded as a natural extension of what has gone before. It tends towards gentle scepticism and is repelled by stridency. It would rather go to the pub than read a self-improvement manual.

This will sound, to many, like a hopelessly imprecise description of what it means to be a conservative. Certainly, the characteristics enumerated above, and some others equally conservative, can be found in all parts of the electorate, though most frequently among those who do not vote. But the point about the existence of this conservative temperament (which is, of course, far from being the only impulse in our politics) is that it gives the Conservative party some hope of exercising a very wide appeal, not by being liberal but by expressing a decent conservatism.

It is in this sense that Kenneth Clarke is infinitely more conservative than Mr Duncan Smith. We have become so bamboozled by those who assert the supremacy of 'policy' over all other considerations that we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that Mr Clarke is `left-wing' while Mr Duncan Smith is 'right-wing'. These tiresome Continental terms obscure far more important differences between the two men. Mr Clarke is not only more experienced. He also has the great virtue of appearing less uptight, less driven and less inclined to imagine that every political problem can be solved by locking a collection of odd young men in a think-tank and telling them not to come out until they have devised a new structure for the health service or a replacement for the domestic rates.

The think-tank approach leads, at least in all but its most gifted practitioners, to a hopelessly mechanistic view of government; one that sees the role of minister as akin to sitting in a control room and achieving the desired effect by pulling levers or pushing buttons. It takes no account of the need for judgment, courage and luck, or of the determining influence which unforeseen circumstances and events will have. There is a version of Margaret Thatcher's success as prime minister in which the think-tanks (notably the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies) play the heroic part, by marking out a route deep into enemy territory with their coruscating pamphlets, while she is reduced to the role of a reasonably competent cook, who simply had to trudge along after them and follow their recipes with a certain dull conscientiousness to achieve triumphant success. Her courage, energy, judgment, pragmatism and ability to work with colleagues from all parts of the conservative tradition and beyond are all taken for granted, while the improvised, hand-to-mouth nature of much of what her administrations actually did is forgotten — as are the enfeebled and divided state of the opposition and the fact that, after many years of humiliating failure and in an atmosphere of crisis, a substantial number of people were prepared to follow a woman who in more normal times would have been cast aside as insufferably irritating. Nor is it remembered that many voters, including many of a conservative disposition, hated her then and hate her still.

Mrs Thatcher was a great prime minister, but one of Mr Duncan Smith's main difficulties is that he appears to regard her as his role model. He seeks, in his naivety, to persuade us that by devising some 'radical' policies and putting them in the next Conservative manifesto he can recapture the first fine careless rapture of 1979. William Hague was dismissed by many voters as 'weak'. This always struck me as unjust: he withstood a pounding that would have destroyed anyone who was weak. But the poor chap invited comparison with Mrs Thatcher, and by comparison with her he did, of course, seem weak. This is a really hopeless path for Mr Duncan Smith to follow and, to do him justice, he seems to have some inkling of this difficulty, and has even attempted, in a recent article in the Times, to describe himself as a 'One Nation Tory'.

Good luck to him, but, if he wins the leadership, he will face an uphill struggle to convince anyone that he really means this. Who, we will want to know, is the real Duncan Smith? Is he Portillo, Thatcher or what? Tony Blair managed to convince millions of voters that he is not an old-fashioned socialist because he plainly isn't one. So shameless is his materialism that he awarded himself a 147.000 pay rise and still tried to get a discount on his luxury holiday hotel in Corn

wall. The enrichissez-vous spirit of the age finds in him a worthy representative. One result is that many Labour voters loathe him with a vengeance, and for reasons which one might fairly term conservative. The man is a living affront to their sense of noblesse oblige, their idea of what, as a wealthy man who also happens to be Labour Prime Minister, one does or does not do.

Here is an opportunity for the next Conservative leader to embarrass Mr Blair and to detach many voters from him. But the next Conservative leader has got to be palpably genuine if he is to score off Mr Blair in this way.

The other day I went down to Chingford, the constituency on the north-eastern fringes of London represented by Mr Duncan Smith, and spent several enjoyable hours in a pub with some of his constituents. Mr Duncan Smith and his predecessor Norman Tebbit have done a fair job of representing, albeit in a somewhat tepid form, the views of Chingford Man to the outside world: the hatred of immigrants, the hatred of Europe and the belief that Mr Clarke is a raving socialist who would best be exterminated. One Chingford man spoke with desperate bitterness about how he hated to see asylum-seekers with their vouchers getting something for nothing, when he himself had worked all his life, and his wife had to pay £35 for her prescriptions. He said such freeloading was particularly unfair on those elderly people who had fought for this coun try during the war. I waited for a break in the flow, in which I might have remarked on the heavy casualties among servicemen from all over the British empire during two world wars, but the Chingfordian was already delivering a summary of Mr Duncan Smith's foreign policy which for pithy brevity would be hard to beat: 'I've no time for the Yanks but I'd rather get into bed with them than with the f—ing Frogs.'

I do not wish to sound superior to these Chingfordians. It is not just that one of them told me, in the friendliest way, 'If you write anything we don't like, we'll find out where you live and send the lads round.' I admire their pugnacity and know that their views are widely held, especially among the white working class which has moved out of the East End of London in order to get away from postwar immigrants. It is far better, in my opinion, that such views should be vented than suppressed and left to fester.

The most distinguished expression of the view that this country is mortally threatened by immigration and by Europe was given by Enoch Powell. He, too, was a great man, but he has had a disastrous effect on the Conservative party. For his intransigence, and the intransigence of his disciples, sounds mean, bitter and narrow-minded to most people, including most people of a conservative disposition. In a crisis, the British may turn to a Powellite, but in more prosperous times they are unwilling to see that things are as desperate as the Powelites think. This impassivity in the face of approaching danger has long been infuriating to Tories of a stern, unbending nature, who react to their compatriots' complacency by redoubling their principled and often career-sacrificing warnings of the rocks ahead, whereupon they are dismissed as insane by an ungrateful public.

Mr Powell was wrong about our capacity to absorb and profit from the services of immigrants; an error which has helped delay the acceptance of these generally rather conservative fellow-citizens by (of all people) the Conservative party. He may, on the other hand, have been absolutely right about the mortal threat posed to Westminster by Brussels. The public is quite hostile to the European Union. Yet few Britons want to have their doubts about the euro expressed in Powellite language. They want to play the whole thing a bit longer. If and when a referendum comes, they will very likely give the political establishment a salutary kick, but they don't want to be told by a gang of panicky ideologues, in a vein of suppressed hysteria, that if we do end up joining the wretched thing, civilisation as we know it will come to an end.

Mr Clarke is wrong about the euro, but at least he is wrong in the generous and unfrightened manner befitting a free-born Englishman. His worst enemies will not be able to say, if he wins, that he is a creepy little Thatcherite. He speaks in a conservative tone of voice. His rudeness is magnificently conservative. Not that I wish to idealise the fellow. Some of my friends say he is too old and does not read enough books, though I cannot bring myself to hold that against him. Others think he sells too many cigarettes to children, though once again I cannot discover within myself so much as a spark of indignation. I may be morally defective, but what I like about Mr Clarke is his plain-spoken honesty — or one could also call it his plain shamelessness, which, in the seemingly unlikely event of the Conservatives being conservative enough to employ him, should be enough to discomfort even Mr Blair.