[A-List] UK state: political realignment

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Portillo's 'mutterings' claim fuels leadership speculation
MICHAEL SETTLE
The Herald, 31 October 2002

MICHAEL Portillo last night fuelled speculation over Iain Duncan Smith's
future by urging him to shape up and "fight back" amid Westminster talk of
Conservative discontent and a possible leadership challenge.

Speaking on FiveNews, the Conservative MP for Kensington and Chelsea, who
last year was defeated by Mr Duncan Smith in a leadership battle, confirmed
there was talk on the Tory back benches of a possible leadership challenge.

He said: "I don't want to kid you, there have been mutterings and I think
Iain Duncan Smith has to fight back. The position is perfectly retrievable
but he has got to fight for it.

"He has to show he wants the leadership and he's got to show which direction
he is leading us in."

It is claimed there are already 25 back-bench Conservatives prepared to
trigger a leadership contest, but none is so far willing to step forward and
begin the process.

Mr Portillo's remarks came just hours after a Mori poll showed Mr Duncan
Smith's approval rating had slipped to its lowest since he became leader.
Most galling for him was the figure that showed his approval rating among
Tories was minus seven.

With Conservative MPs describing the mood within the party as "gloomy" and
"ghastly", the prospect of a leadership challenge this year is growing.

Mr Portillo, conspicuously more present in the Commons of late, ruled
himself out of wanting the party leadership, declaring: "I'm not
interested."

He denied he was one of the "mutterers" and insisted Tories would make
"complete fools of themselves" if they changed their leader every 12 months
Mr Portillo urged Mr Duncan Smith to stamp his authority on the party by
making "some very strong speech". Coincidentally, the Tory leader is due to
end a regional tour tomorrow with an address in Easterhouse, Glasgow,
repeating a visit he made in February, after which he claimed his
experiences there had made him "a changed man".

-----

Portillo stirs row over Tory leadership

Nicholas Watt, political correspondent
Thursday October 31, 2002
The Guardian

Michael Portillo last night blew open the crisis in the Tory party when he
called on Iain Duncan Smith to overcome his "difficult situation" by
launching a fightback to prevent a leadership challenge against him before
the next election.

In a move which will infuriate the Tory leadership, the former cabinet
minister became the first senior Tory to admit in public that Mr Duncan
Smith is in trouble when he warned of "mutterings" among MPs.

His intervention came after three newspapers, including the Guardian,
reported that 25 MPs were on standby to trigger a leadership contest.

As William Hague spearheaded a fightback to save Mr Duncan Smith, by
pleading with Tory MPs to stand by their leader, Mr Portillo insisted that
he had no interest in the leadership. But he blew apart a carefully
orchestrated operation by Tory central office to dismiss Tory rebels when he
said: "I don't want to kid you. There have been mutterings and I think Iain
Duncan Smith has to fight back. The position is perfectly retrievable. But
he has got to fight. He has got to show he wants the leadership."

On Channel Five News last night, Mr Portillo said Mr Duncan Smith should
press on with his modernising campaign and not repeat the mistake of the
former Tory leader Mr Hague, who failed to settle on a consistent course.

In a swipe at Mr Duncan Smith, who beat him in last year's leadership
contest, Mr Portillo called on him to follow the example of the Labour
leader Harold Wilson who "brilliantly" silenced his critics.

"There was a lot of muttering against him and he brilliantly went to his
party conference and said 'A lot of you think I don't know what's going on.
I know what is going on. I am going on.' That is the sort of spirit we need.
Iain needs to make it perfectly clear he is going on."

Insisting he was "not doing the muttering", Mr Portillo refused to say
whether Mr Duncan Smith would survive until the next general election.

Asked whether he would challenge for the leadership, Mr Portillo said: "I
don't want to be leader of the party. I can't tell what is going to happen.
But if Iain wants to pull the situation back, he can."

Mr Portillo's less than enthusiastic endorsement of Mr Duncan Smith will be
a blow to the Tory leadership, which had hoped that Mr Duncan Smith had
saved his skin, for the moment at least, with a strong performance in the
Commons, where he was generally believed to have outwitted Tony Blair on
health and education.

Tory whips launched an operation to support Mr Duncan Smith in the Commons.
Scores of MPs loudly cheered him as he tackled the prime minister. Buoyed up
by his strong performance, Mr Duncan Smith embarked on a tour of the Commons
tea room, accompanied by the Tory chairwoman, Theresa May.

Loyalists were particularly delighted that Mr Hague decided to write a piece
in today's Times saying his successor should be given a chance. Mr Hague,
who faced similar sniping during his four years as Tory leader, decided to
speak out after yesterday's headlines.

A friend of the previous Tory leader said: "This is the first time William
has done anything like this since the leadership contest. But he felt it was
time to say something."

Most MPs agree Mr Duncan Smith must put in a strong performance when he
replies to the Queen's speech on November 13. If he emerges unscathed, he
must then ensure that the Tories do well in next May's local elections.

-----

Duncan Smith is finished. Voters want a human being

The quiet man's failure has at least paved the way for Kenneth Clarke

Hugo Young
Thursday October 31, 2002
The Guardian

Iain Duncan Smith is the ultimate argument in favour of the importance of
personality in politics. He doesn't have one. Those who put him where he is
today thought that didn't matter. They knew he was a small, obsessive,
honest character entirely lacking in refulgence. They clothed him with an
ideology they thought he embodied, and an integrity they then decided to
regard as the be-all and end-all of leadership. But already he is finished.
Even the rightwing press are saying so. Less than 18 months after choosing
him, the Conservative party is deciding it made a mistake. The quiet man
wrote his own epitaph. A year from now he will not, I think, be with us.

Ideas do matter, and IDS has struggled to find some. But personality, in the
modern age, matters more. It is via his face and other instinctive vibes
that a leader registers what kind of human being he is, which is the prime
concern of most voters who pay little attention to what is going on. To
succeed from a standing start, without the credentials of experience, coming
out of nowhere, a leader needs first to be seen as a fully paid up member of
the human race.

This is why Tony Blair so quickly became a popular leader, and remains one,
to an extent that Gordon Brown could probably never be. Blair is less
defined by politics than most other practitioners of the game. He exudes
normality. He is attentive but not, it seems, obsessive. In silly tests by
opinion pollsters, his image is associated with drinks and cars that conform
to the preferences of regular people. IDS is put down as a dry sherry man, a
potation now associated, if at all, with golf club socials that are likely
to be all-white and elderly. The leader's patent inability - an unalterable
feature of the model - to fill the minimal leadership spec means that, as
long as he is there, the Conservative party will continue to be doomed. And
now it knows it.

What are the essential pieces of the leaderly personality? Four are surely
crucial. A leader needs nerve: chutzpah in defence of risk is a key
component. A leader needs menace: the instilling of a certain fear, growing
out of the capacity for dangerous surprise. A leader needs wit: the ability
to make swift repartee for television, never flummoxed, sometimes
outrageous, usually winning. A leader needs steel: a quiet intransigence of
purpose that everybody understands, without always being certain of the
inner game he may be playing.

These talents have to serve a fifth requirement, which is, of course, some
kind of vision. Blair had a vision that was easy to read and easier to
justify. The past dictated it. There had to be reform. Blair's nerve, his
threats, his platform facility, his back-room skills, and above all his
steel, imposed a reform of the Labour party that had the history of 15
years' painful failure on its side.

That's what carried the party. But, among the wider electorate, the vision
was less important than the personality promoting it. The voters wanted to
be sure Labour wouldn't make another mess of the economy, but took only
passing interest in clause 4. They wanted to be sure they were going to be
led by a man they related to, a potentially big man who could sweep aside
his enemies, speaking by natural instinct both from and to the world that
they inhabited.

Duncan Smith, contrary to what some expected, did make a stumbling approach
towards a vision. Even he, with his rightist pedigree, saw the need to reach
beyond it. Something had to change in a party widely seen as nasty. The
juvenilia and xenophobic fanaticism of the immediate past had to be
replaced. Striking out in this direction, IDS made a partial escape from the
atavistic demands of the Telegraph and the Mail, those two lead-weights
forever holding the Tory party down in an antique, paralysed righteousness.
Already he has tentatively moved it.

The trouble is that hardly anyone notices or cares. The ideas bit has just
begun to shift, but the personality bit - the agent of belief, the conduit
to public interest - is intractable. Under present management it will always
be so. However, the leader has performed a service. The conditions are now
different from 18 months ago, when IDS was chosen by the rank and file. He
has led Conservatism to the edge of the precipice where it can finally see
rock bottom. But he has also paved the way for somebody not like him. Having
abandoned the hardline agenda, he has released the party from the cul de sac
that led it inexorably, the last two times, towards the dead end of the old
right.

Groping for a centrist position, in other words, it is free to consider the
kind of personality that might make a leader. It can look for someone whose
style, and scale, and nerve, and confidence, and swift wit in handling Tony
Blair might make it feel good about itself, inject a little self-belief,
disturb the multiple complacencies that cross-cut with anxious frenzy to
define the mental state of the government: and might put some energy behind
an effort to construct the Tory version of public service improvement which
is the main task of modern British politics.

The front-runner for this role appears to be Michael Portillo. He looks like
the obvious replacement, by age and experience. He was a fine minister and
remains a man of large thoughts. He qualifies under the headings of risk and
nerve and possibly menace. But he is not steely. His most recent discussion
of his future, with David Frost, revealed a furrowed neurotic who can't make
up his mind. Like David Davis, the light weight chancer, Portillo would
offer no absolute guarantee that the party might not be looking for yet
another new leader before very long.

The man for whom IDS's trajectory - political shift and personality wipe-out
alike - prepares the way is, in truth, Kenneth Clarke. For a demoralised
party, Clarke is the only man who checks out all the boxes. His problem is
Europe, where he goes against the majority Tory grain. But IDS did Clarke a
special favour by not only moving things centrewards but decreeing that
Europe was no longer to be high on the party agenda. Though there is a party
line, everyone could say what they wanted. Putting Europe in its place, IDS
made Clarke, the unfashionable europhile, more credible as his replacement

Europe obviously remains an issue, though if Blair renounced the referendum
it would be irrelevant. I believe, such is the depth of justified gloom and
panic among active Tories, that Clarke's personal qualities - his size, his
humanity, his bullish noise, his capacity for swift and lethal shafting of
the other side - are now ready to be seen as more important than the
inconvenience of his euro opinions. In place of the quiet dry stick that can
barely stir a pile of autumn leaves, the Tories have in their armoury a
flaming broadsword. They need it for their survival. One way or another, I
think that is what they will in due course produce to fight the next
election.