[A-List] UK legitimation crisis: state party vs. no party

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

An Act All Too Easy To Follow

Iain MacWhirter doesn't see even a change of tory leadership ending labour's
electoral dictatorship
The Sunday Herald, 3 November 2002

HERE we go again: leadership crisis in the Conservative Party, senior Tories
sniping at each other as the party sinks in the polls. Only 18 months since
the current leader was elected, and already bookies are taking bets on his
replacement. The quiet man, Iain Duncan Smith, whose determination we were
told not to underestimate, is being vigorously underestimated by senior
members of his own party.

It's like a B-grade soap opera in a bad patch. The story so far: last week,
Owen (Paterson, Duncan Smith's parliamentary secretary) blurted out that
'malcontents' like Andrew (Mac kay) and Anthony (Steen) have been saying
beastly things about Dunkers in the 1922 (the committee with the power to
oust the leader). Others decided to spill the beans about the 25 Tory
tea-room plotters. Anthony went straight to his lawyers.

This made Michael (Portillo) so angry that he took time off from installing
telephone lines to urge Dunkers to jolly well speak up for himself, or he
would have to do it for him. Bernard (Jenkin) was so incensed at it all that
he went on the radio to tell people like Douglas (Hogg) and Stephen
(Dorrell) just where to get off. And to tell Michael, in so many words, to
push off back to the opera. Meanwhile everyone knows that Ken (Clarke) is
still desperate for Dunkers's job and is only waiting until people like
Douglas come out with what they've been saying in private: that the Tory
leader is a complete no-hoper ... (continued on Channel 94).

I suppose it is a plot of sorts. But a soap is no good unless you have
characters, and the biggest problem for the UK Tories right now is that they
haven't got any. Ken Clarke and Michael Portillo apart, no-one knows who
these people are. Last week's re-emergence of Baroness Thatcher from
self-imposed exile only underlined how characterless the Tories have become.

>From the top down, the party is becoming anonymous. Last week's ICM poll
suggested that fewer voters can identify Iain Duncan Smith now than when he
was elected. This is quite an achievement for a leader of the opposition,
especially in the middle of a crisis like Iraq. If this goes on, the Tories
may become invisible to the naked eye; they will have slipped below the
electoral horizon.

My bet, for what it's worth, is that IDS will not be leading the party into
the next general election. This is because his first test as leader will,
largely, be his performance in the Scottish parliamentary and Welsh Assembly
elections. A significant Tory revival in May is about as likely as Angus
Deayton becoming mono gamous. The Scottish Tories' recent poll showings have
barely been in double figures.

Of course, Scotland is different, and the Tories cannot be expected to pull
off an electoral miracle here. But try explaining that to a national media
looking for a kill. About the only story of interest in a campaign which is
a foregone conclusion will be whether Duncan Smith will still be in place at
the end of it -- and who is going to replace him when he goes.

Michael Portillo, former defence secretary and reformed Thatcherite, is
circling the Commons tea-room again, having tried unsuccessfully to give up
politics for a career in arts administration. He's got the right 'inclusive'
attitudes, and was one of the first to argue that the Tories had to address
their image as the nasty (in the words of party chairman Theresa May) party.
But it might be just a little early for Polly to make a come-back after his
humiliating defeat last time. Lurid headlines and speculation about his
private life led to his campaign for the leadership faltering after the
first hurdle.

Kenneth Clarke, the former Chancellor, battled bravely in the 2001
leadership contest and bel ieves himself the only true heavy weight left on
the Conservative benches -- in which assessment he is probably right. People
have forgotten his temporary alliance with far-right extra-terrestrial John
Redwood in 1997. Clarke's main problem, however (apart from his age: he will
be 65 at the next general election), remains his commitment to Europe. He is
coming to Edinburgh on Wednesday to launch the Scottish Tory European
Network, which will campaign for an early referendum on the single currency.

Most Tory MPs still hate Europe. But they hate losing their seats even more,
so they might be prepared to thole a Ken Clarke leadership. The party in the
country would probably go along with them.

But apart from Europe, no-one really knows what Ken Clarke stands for these
days, apart from beer, jazz and cigars. He has been out of the front line so
long he may not realise how much the landscape has changed in the past two
years. Bluster and bonhomie are not enough any more. The tragedy of Iain
Duncan Smith -- not that anyone is likely to shed many tears -- is that in
many ways he has been doing the right things. He banned hangers and floggers
like the Monday Club and expelled racists. More rec ently he made a decisive
break with old Thatcherite warhorses like Norman Tebbit and softened the
party line on Europe. At last month's conference he made a real attempt to
atone for the arrogance and elitism of the old Conservatism by letting it be
known that the party was no longer hostile to gays, blacks and single
mothers.

IDS has also encouraged his spokesmen to come up with new ideas. Admittedly
some of them, like subsidising middle-class parents to send their children
to private schools, are pretty barking -- but at this stage, who cares? It's
not as if they're likely to be called upon to implement them. At least it
suggested that they weren't entirely braindead. But a month on, about the
only thing people can remember with any clarity from the Tory conference is
Theresa May's shoes. The truth is that no-one is really listening to the
Tories right now.

A lot of people will say this is all to the good, especially in Scotland,
where Tory is still a four-letter word. However, the crisis of the
Conservatives poses serious problems for Brit ish democracy. Our system is
an adversarial one, premised on there being two major parties ready to
battle it out in parliament. In America there is a complex of checks and
balances designed to prevent one branch of government -- legislature,
executive, judiciary -- getting the upper hand. In Britain the only check is
the opposition, and if there is no opposition there is no balance. Elective
dictatorship is a danger inherent in our system. Tony Blair has always
behaved like a president, but now there is nothing to stop him becoming a
proto-monarch.

In opposition, Labour would have pursued the government over Iraq, PFI,
political donations, hospital waiting lists, Apache helicopters that can't
be flown. It would have given a voice to many sections of the public. But
with Labour in government and the Tories nowhere, the dissenting voice on
the Labour benches is muffled. Even in Labour's darkest hour in the early
1980s, it had an alternative view of how the economy should be run and how
society should be ordered. The Tories have no such vision, no real
constituency but the frothing mouths on the Daily Mail.

Parliament isn't working. It will take more than the introduction of
sensible working hours to persuade a cynical and apathetic electorate to
bother voting, when the choice is between a governing party that is
immovable and an opposition that is irrelevant.