[A-List] UK state: political realignment

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

Party's death knell or premature burial?

Lib Dems ready to step into void left by ailing opposition

Patrick Wintour, chief political correspondent
Wednesday November 6, 2002
The Guardian

The Conservative party, born from the Tory faction of the court of Charles
II is in danger of dying, Iain Duncan Smith said yesterday.

Mr Duncan Smith was doubtless trying to put the crisis confronting his
fellow MPs in the starkest possible terms, but senior Tories, including
peers, are seriously speculating that they will come third behind the
Liberal Democrats at the next election.

At party leader Charles Kennedy's two-day strategy session last weekend,
held in the Tory Cotswolds, the crisis facing the Tories, and its
implications for the Liberal Democrats, dominated a three-hour session. The
air was thick with metaphors including open goals, windows of opportunity
and golden moment.

Mr Kennedy has always been reluctant to talk in terms of replacing the
Conservatives but he did agree at the meeting that such was the current
plight of the Tories that he will now officially declare that his ambition
is to overtake them.

The party also immediately agreed to raise its sights by targeting any seat
in which the Tories have a majority of up to 7,000. The immediate ambition
increases the target of Tory seats from 20 to 29, putting Liberal Democrats
on 81 and the Conservatives on 136.

In reality, Lord Rennard, the party's respected pollster reckons the
position is more dynamic: "This is not a problem of one leader or the last
few months. The Conservatives have been in deep trouble since September
1992. We gained six points during the last election, and if we do that
again, we will be neck and neck with the Tories. That in turn could give us
further momentum."

Mark Oaten, the energetic Liberal Democrat MP charged with chasing the
Tories, also does not rule out the possibility of the total demise of the
Conservatives. "We had the strange death of Liberal England in the last
century. Every 70 years or so in Britain a political party either collapses
or is so reformed it is no longer recognisable."

Mr Oaten said the fate of the Tories was partly down to how the Liberal
Democrats performed over the next parliamentary session. "The Conservatives
have become the fire chamber of British politics. It means there is a huge
vacuum in British politics where the opposition once was. We have to fill it
and keep increasing our credibility."

All this may be inflamed talk at an excitable moment of political crisis:
the next election is at least three years away; the Tories still have a
strong base in local government; William Hague's disastrous 2001 campaign
showed a hard core 30% Conservative vote; the party's membership is more
than 300,000, larger than Labour, and Iain Duncan Smith has a personal
mandate from 150,000 party members.

Moreover, the Conservative party has always had a passion for office. Its
longest period in the wilderness came between 1846 and 1866. Otherwise from
1830 to the present day, the Tories were never out of office for more than
11 years.

Anthony Seldon, the Conservative historian argues that the great gift of the
Tories has been their thirst for power. "What is remarkable about the
Conservatives is not their ideological or interest tenacity, but their
willingness to jettison positions which no longer appeal: laissez faire, the
House of Lords, the union with all Ireland, the empire have all been
abandoned when it suited the party. Private ownership, private ownership are
the only enduring Tory values."

But over the past few years the Conservatives seem to have been split on
policy, as opposed to its cultural values. That makes things more difficult
to resolve. It also breeds personal animosity and feuding. As Ann Widdecombe
admitted yesterday: "For some years we learnt the habit of arguing in
public. We have got to unlearn that habit".

As the Conservatives gloomily spent Guy Fawkes night pondering their own
plots, they could have at least remembered that such pessimism has gripped
their leaders before. Lord Salisbury, wrote in 1882: "It will be interesting
to be the last Conservative. I forsee that will be our fate."

Despite the extension of the franchise, the party went on to hold power for
most of the next 100 years.

-----

The bastard's bastard shows his suicidal side

Simon Hoggart
Wednesday November 6, 2002
The Guardian

"D'you think we've peaked too soon?" asked a Tory peer I bumped into just
after Iain Duncan Smith's plaintive announcement yesterday. Graveyard humour
is the only kind they have left.

You couldn't overestimate the horror - the Heart Of Darkness horror - that
has gripped the Tory party now.

"Who persuaded IDS to make that crass, that catastrophic statement?" asked
one frontbencher. "He holds a press conference to say: 'I lead a party that
is out of control, and there's nothing I can do'."

Many Tories remembered with something less than fondness the 46 times IDS
had voted against the John Major government. Or was it 47? No-one recalls.
The red mist has come down. They stagger round the place blinded by fury and
despair.

"He was a fifth-columnist, a saboteur," said a backbencher. "Now he asks for
loyalty. Him! Loyalty!"

Another was more blunt: "That bastard was the most disloyal bastard of all
the bastards John Major had to cope with. And do you know why? Because he's
a bastard!"

"Come off the fence and tell me what you really think!" I wanted to cry.
Instead, I went for a cup of tea with a Labour MP who knows lots of Tories.

"Whatever IDS thinks, there aren't any cabals gathered against him. It's
just a lot of individuals who think he's no good," he said.

"And it's going to get worse. After the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon
turned his cannon on the river ice, so that thousands of Russian and
Austrian soldiers drowned as they fled.

"That's what New Labour are going to do to them. They'll be screaming, but
there won't be any mercy."

At Conservative Central Office, the hacks had been gathered with 20 minutes
warning. There was an air of terrific excitement. We love a disaster. Which
disaster would it be? He might be about to resign. Or it could be more
disastrous - he might not resign.

IDS was flanked by people who are loyalists - at present. There was Michael
Ancram and Theresa May, her shoes tragically hidden under the desk. Oliver
Letwin gazed up at his leader with what was meant to be earnest interest,
but actually seemed to say: "I know I've seen this bloke somewhere. Was it
on TV? Or at that awful dinner party?"

The statement - it lasted all of two minutes and 47 seconds - was meant to
be tough and resolute. Instead it was plucking and pleading. His words were
abrasive and authoritative, but his body language was soft and shrinking and
defensive.

He begged for our good opinion. He had never underestimated the task ahead.
He had never flinched.

He had sought to do all these fine things with "courtesy, decency and
honesty". This was getting embarrassing. The army was surrounded. Napoleon
was about to wheel his cannon towards the ice. And the commanding officer
was asking us to praise his good manners and tact.

"Over the past few weeks, a small group of my parliamentary colleagues have
decided consciously to undermine my leadership. For a few, last night's vote
was not about adoption, but an attempt to challenge my mandate to lead this
party."

You could almost hear the cry of rage from Michael Portillo who had chosen
his issue so well. It was indeed a matter of conscience but also a perfect
opportunity to shaft the leadership. What more can any politician want?

"The Conservative party wants to be led. It elected me to lead it in the
direction I am now going," he said, and we mentally added, "wherever the
hell that might prove to be."

"My message is simple and stark: unite or die!" And with those three words,
he became the first Conservative leader in history to turn himself into a
suicide bomber.