MICHAEL HOWARD is doing a good job as Leader of the Opposition. He has seized control of the agenda and, aided by Labour’s limping campaign, is threatening to cut a swath through the Labour marginals. He has, however, made a mistake. I shall tell the story while there is still time to correct it.
The Conservative Party, with only 164 MPs, has a large group of gifted young candidates. As two of my children belong to this group — as does my colleague Michael Gove — I’ve met many of them. Collectively, I think this is the ablest group since the 1979 intake, perhaps the ablest since the golden entry of 1950. They are not particularly right wing or left wing; they are rather serious, with a well rooted belief in Conservative values. As leader, Mr Howard must be proud of them; they are, after all, the future of his party.
One of the ablest of this able group is Danny Kruger, who works as a senior researcher for the Conservative Party. His contemporaries like and admire him for his intelligence, for his contribution to the party’s thought and for the firmness of his Evangelical faith. When he was adopted as the prospective candidate for Sedgefield, the Prime Minister’s constituency, their comment was that Sedgefield was very lucky to get so good a candidate. It would have been the first seat he had fought.
Last week it was announced that he was withdrawing as the candidate for Sedgefield; this was because of a column published on March 11 by Polly Toynbee, the Guardian writer. She had attended the Keith Joseph Lecture. David Cameron, a rising Conservative star a couple of parliamentary generations senior to Danny, had given a interesting talk, arguing that the Conservatives were “pragmatic not ideological, sceptics not visionaries”.
This is one of the traditional Conservative points of view; I associate it with the great Lord Salisbury in the 1890s, with Stanley Baldwin and “safety first” in 1929, or with Winston Churchill returning to office in 1951. It often makes sense, but it had never been good enough for the new generation.
It has been opposed by such varied characters as Lord Randolph Churchill, who believed in “Tory democracy”, the young Winston Churchill, who left and joined the Liberals, and, of course, by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in 1975. Polly Toynbee, an excellent journalist who has no more understanding of Conservative philosophy than the woman in the Moon, thought that Mr Cameron’s lecture was “dangerously iconoclastic”; it is, in truth, the doctrine of Tory quietism.
In the course of the discussion, Danny Kruger, if the quotation is correct, said that the Conservative’s “plan to introduce a period of creative destruction in the public services”. That was all. Of course, it depends on the meaning you attach to “creative destruction”. The reference is to the work of the left-wing Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who was the leading intellectual figure of the Harvard economics faculty in the 1930s. In his work on business cycles, he described what he thought was the cyclical process of renewal and growth in the capitalist economy.
His view was that the new is always built on the demolition of the old; railways replace stage coaches, automobiles replace the horse and buggy, electricity replaces gas lighting, and so on. This process he referred to as “creative destruction”. It is essentially benign.
I’m not sure whether Schumpeter was the first to use the phrase. The idea is much older. It is implicit in the work of Adam Smith, Malthus and Darwin. It involves “the survival of the fittest”. It is universal in biology; this is the way the body renews itself. Perhaps the best example of “creative destruction” is the process by which milk teeth fall out to make way for adult teeth. The same process takes place in all social systems. The dead make way for the living.
Schumpeter used to be read by left- wing intellectuals; in the late 1970s I remember discussing creative destruction with Denis Healey, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yet Polly Toynbee thought that Danny Kruger had produced a startling new idea. For once he had not, but was making an almost routine reference to a well established intellectual theory.
In fact, “creative destruction in the public services” is only a somewhat more vigorous way of referring to “radical reform in the public services”. If the Conservatives do not plan to have some “creative destruction”, they will not get any reform: they might just as well pack up and go home. “Radical reform” sounds a little less alarming, but it means reform from the root. “Radical reform” is what Tony Blair was promising in 1997. It has been one of his greatest failures. What happened next to Danny Kruger was the pity. I do not think it is a tragedy because I believe that a setback is usually good for a politician’s career, if he, or she, is a person of real substance, as Danny plainly is. Somebody made the mistake of reading Miss Toynbee. It would have been much safer just to read the first and last paragraphs to see what she was on about. The words “creative destruction” stood out in all their awful majesty; unfortunately the reader had never seen them before.
It was decided — and this must have been a decision for Mr Howard himself — that such language, though now more than 60 years old, was too embarrassing to be tolerated. Danny must apologise; Danny must give up Sedgefield; Sedgefield, a more serious matter, must give up Danny. The public could not be trusted to understand a phrase which had been unfamiliar to Miss Toynbee and, presumably, to Mr Howard himself. Danny, the loyal servant of the party, gave up his candidature, to avoid further embarrassment.
Well, it does not. It is embarrassing that the Conservative Party, even in election time, could be so silly, so lacking in intellectual freedom. Michael Howard got it wrong. He should ask Danny to go back to Sedgefield.
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