[A-List] UK state: political realignment

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

This is a promising development for those of us who read the runes of the
British state -- i.e., that Max Hastings should be given a regular, and
serious, column (as opposed to the drivel he has been writing for Associated
Newspapers of late). That this should be good is because few are as equipped
as he to tell us about what many within the upper echelons of British state
and capital actually think. In this respect he is a worthy successor to Hugo
Young.

-----

This turnip makes Michael Foot look like Spartacus

The Tories should choose a leader to lose the next election with dignity

Max Hastings
Tuesday October 28, 2003
The Guardian

For more than a year, I have been imploring my Tory friends to act swiftly
and ruthlessly to dispose of Iain Duncan Smith. My motives are selfish. One
day, I want to be able to vote Tory again. Like millions of others, I cannot
do so while the party is led by a turnip. If the Tories stick with IDS until
he has lost a general election, the consequences for them will be
catastrophic.

IDS makes Michael Foot resemble Spartacus. He was given the job only because
he was not Kenneth Clarke, and because he professed the rightwing
enthusiasms prevalent among the very old party members who selected him.

His tenure has been disastrous. His recent conference speech was among the
worst by any party leader in living memory. Next day some loyalists and -
more surprisingly - newspaper pundits claimed that it had been adequate to
keep him in his job. Anyone capable of such delusions was in denial about
the past, present and future of the Conservative party.

I am among millions of angry former Tory voters, who have watched the party
march blindfold over the political precipice since 1997. Those of us who
supported Michael Heseltine, Clarke, Douglas Hurd, and the old centrist
vision of Toryism always feared that after an election defeat the right
would seize control. And so they did.

What has happened since 1997 has been dismaying not only because so many of
us cannot support the Hague-IDS party, but because it is plain that such
leaders, and such policies, can never again hope to win a general election.

Not one of IDS's potential successors is capable of leading the Tories to
power. But there is a chance that they could lose the next general election
with dignity, rather than as an object of ridicule. The new leader's job is
to get what's left of the party off the beaches in small boats, so that it
may be capable of winning an election in seven or eight years' time.

Consider the candidates. Oliver Letwin is a clever man who could win a poll
for the presidency of an Oxbridge college, but is never likely to win a
ballot among the British people. David Davis is brighter and nastier than
IDS, but punches at about the same weight as, say, Patricia Hewitt - which
is not heavy enough to get him to Downing Street.

I passionately argued the case for Clarke in 1997, but now it is too late.
He despises most Tory MPs, and they hate him. Ken cannot be bothered to take
the leadership now unless the party signs an unconditional surrender to his
terms, notably on Europe. This it will never do.

If Michael Portillo stands, he could be a serious contender. Today it is
hard to know what he believes. He is clever and charismatic, but
Conservative heavyweights believe that unrevealed aspects of his gay past
could still torpedo him. All the indications suggest that he has no taste
for exposing his private life to scrutiny. More important, in the eyes of
some of us, in office he displayed very poor judgment. He seems too louche
to be a credible party leader.

We are left with Michael Howard. I disagree with almost everything Howard
stands for, but if I was a Tory MP I would vote for him in a leadership
contest. He is an intelligent man of great experience, who can engage Tony
Blair in the Commons on something like equal terms.

No one expects Howard to win the next election. His task is simply to keep
his party in the ring - to enable it to win enough votes to become a contend
er for power two elections down the track. If he behaves sensibly, he might
be capable of doing this. He could afterwards disappear into honourable
retirement, making way for the leader of a new generation.

If you are bemused by the notion that any left-of-centre Tory could support
such a man as Howard, even as a stopgap, think again about the alternatives.
Over recent years, all the old knights of the shire and voices of moderate
Conservatism have retired or been winnowed out. Rightwing Stalinism has
overtaken the party, of such a kind that anyone who is not "sound on
Europe" - which means loathing everything to do with it - possesses no hope
of getting or keeping a parliamentary seat.

Old Bill Deedes observed at a Daily Telegraph leader conference back in 1987
that he believed the Conservative party could destroy itself over Europe. At
the time, I thought his prophesy extravagant. Yet now we see it close to
coming to pass. The old pragmatism, the respect for consensus which won
elections for the Tories generation after generation has been systematically
purged.

The Tories learned utterly the wrong lesson from the experience of Mrs
Thatcher. In 1979, amid a national economic and industrial crisis comparable
to 1940, she ruthlessly rewrote the rules, not only of the Tory party, but
of British life. By 1990, she had achieved remarkable and important things,
but the British people were surfeited with her style of government.

The Tory right proclaimed in November 1990 that the party was making a huge
error by dumping her, that both Conservatives and the country would repent
the folly. Not so. No one outside Tunbridge Wells lamented the departure of
Thatcher.

Just as Winston Churchill was rightly dismissed by the people after
performing his historic service to them as a war leader, so there was no
room in British politics for Thatcher after she had done her business in the
1980s.

Yet since 1997, the Tories have genuflected constantly to "the Thatcherite
legacy". Both Hague and IDS have offered a sleighride back to the halcyon
days of, say, 1983 - a place to which the British people have not the
smallest desire to go.

The Tories will never be electable until they can find a leader who can
offer the British people a vision of the future, not of the past. Britain is
now a social democratic country. Barring a national cataclysm, a visibly
rightwing party will not again achieve power here.

Ever since 1997, the party and its media supporters have addressed the
political agenda with an iron-clad ideological rectitude, based upon the
beliefs that: a) sooner or later, the turn of public opinion will bring the
Tories back to power, whatever follies they commit or policies they espouse;
and b) even if this proves untrue, it is better to be ideologically virtuous
than to trim in mere pursuit of power. Both these propositions are
ridiculous.

Politics is meaningless unless a party achieves power. Until the last few
years of the 20th century, the Conservatives always understood that it was
necessary to adapt some policies in order to win the chance to implement
others.

Most of the above is obvious to millions of British voters, but it has not
seemed obvious to the Tories. Their duty is to ditch the turnip, so they can
choose the man under whom they will lose the next election. But they should
be thinking now, today, about what comes after that - about which man and
what policies might fulfil the purpose the Conservative party is supposed to
exist for, and return it to power.

· Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London
Evening Standard