The Conservative Party made an historic error in choosing Iain Duncan Smith as leader last year. This kindly, dignified, decent man seems bemused by the job. The public shares his bemusement. He has neither leadership flair nor apparent conviction. He makes no impact. Mr Duncan Smith is the third and least convincing challenger the Tories have hurled against Tony Blair. If they want a hope at the next election, they must correct that mistake and fast.
In days of yore, the procedure would have been swift. Dark shapes would move behind curtained windows in SW1. Soundings would be taken. Three men would get into a car and the deed would be done. Frightfully sorry, old boy. Not worked out. No alternative. Peerage of course.
Loyalty was once the Tories’ secret weapon. The candidate disappointed by the “magic circle” would propose the victor to his fellow MPs. Curzon proposed Baldwin. Butler proposed Macmillan. Whitelaw proved Margaret Thatcher’s most loyal champion. The grandees hovered in the background guarding the Ark of the Covenant, the Tory will to rule. The leader was merely the agent of that will, the job being simply to win. Nothing and no one should stand in the way of winning.
Now loyalty is a curse. The Tories have lost interest in winning. Every MP seems to accept that the Duncan Smith vote was an error, yet shrugs and mutters that “the chap must be given the chance of one election”. Something might turn up. Anyway, Mr Blair is a pretty good Tory for the time being.
This defeatism was awesomely displayed on Monday when the party chairman, Theresa May, plunged into public psychoanalysis of hers as the “nasty party”. She seemed to forget that this mortification of the soul was tried by William Hague in 1998 and just made everyone miserable. Now the Shadow Cabinet is frantically disinterring policies tried by past Tory Governments, as if they might still be touched by Thatcherism’s magic dust. It was Peter Walker who sold council houses.
It was Kenneth Clarke who first wanted to free “trust hospitals” from Treasury control. It was Gillian Shephard who wanted “parents to choose schools”.
The Tory Party’s sudden espousal of decentralisation and localism is a welcome repentance after 18 years of eroding local democracy. But localism, like more open government, has become a mere slogan of Opposition. Mr Blair used to be a champion of “communitarianism”, chattering on about neighbourhood empowerment and local autonomy until it all vanished in a smile when he came to power. Now he cannot even give hospitals the freedom promised them by Mrs Thatcher under “trust status” in 1990.
Yet today’s Tory party could promise the moon and nobody would notice. Mr Duncan Smith’s mind is as open as his face is bland. He proclaims 26 policy initiatives, but he might as well proclaim five or 50. Nothing that he does or says moves opinion in any measurable degree. His aides can offer no indicator or statistic or even anecdote to illustrate the success of his leadership. A man can be as honourable as the day is long and yet be no match for the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
It is a decade since the Tory party was able to put an optimistic army into the field. That decade coincides almost exactly with the new Labour project under the leadership, since 1994, of Mr Blair. He has reduced the most feared electoral machine in Western democracy, the Tory party, to a nervous wreck. In those ten years the Conservatives have lost two general elections and all but the safest by-elections. They have never sustained an opinion poll lead and have virtually abandoned local government, the bedrock of any electoral recovery. They have been utterly trounced.
After years of trouncing, the best they can produce is Mr Duncan Smith. The case made for him is that the moon may change. War and recession may yet do for Mr Blair what Black Wednesday is said to have done for John Major in 1992. If the Government once loses its poll lead, goes the argument, savage internecine strife will tear Labour apart. All the Tories need do is sit tight and bide their time.
The Tories plead that Mrs Thatcher was never thought a plausible Prime Minister in the two years after she usurped Sir Edward Heath as leader. The party assumed that she would act as caretaker while William Whitelaw, Francis Pym and Jim Prior sorted out who should replace her before the 1979 election. But Mrs Thatcher confronted a Labour Party that was derelict. No full-term Government had survived a general election throughout the Sixties or Seventies. The maxim held true that governments lost elections, Oppositions never won them.
Mrs Thatcher changed that. Three Labour leaders stepped forward to unseat her, yet all failed. The reason was not that she or her policies were popular. Neither was the case. Nor did Mrs Thatcher come near to Mr Blair’s sustained popularity. What secured her in office was that Labour could not find anyone whom the electorate could see in her place. She simply outshone Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. The electorate even voted for her amanuensis, Mr Major, rather than put Mr Kinnock into 10 Downing Street. Though pundits hate that unquantifiable term, charisma, Mrs Thatcher won three elections with it and Mr Blair looks set to do likewise.
The Conservatives have tried three uncharismatic leaders and not one has been able to dent Mr Blair. His custodianship of the public services is not rated a success. His hyper-regulation of the public and private sectors enrages all interest groups. His administration has been self-regarding and not a little sleazy. But he remains popular, a popularity buttressed, propped and underpinned by the lasting weakness of the Tory Opposition.
Political hindsight can teach some lessons. It is hard to believe that a Tory party led by Michael Heseltine or Kenneth Clarke or Michael Portillo would be in such a mess. Any of these “big beasts” would have actively challenged Mr Blair on public service incompetence and kowtowing to George Bush. None would have tolerated the humiliation meted out to a cowed audience by Theresa May in Bournemouth.
Just over a year ago Tory MPs denied their party members a choice between Mr Clarke and Mr Portillo for leader. I thought they had taken leave of their senses. Despite just six votes separating Mr Clarke, Mr Duncan Smith and Mr Portillo in the MPs’ ballot, party officials on the 1922 Committee put forward only the first two names to the membership for election. The party could not apparently be trusted to count to three. The suspicion was that the committee knew that Mr Clarke’s Europhilia would cost him victory and give the job to Mr Duncan Smith. MPs thus again selected a “club” figure in preference to a “mob” one, as they had with John Major and William Hague.
Clubmanship as a qualification for Tory leader has not worked. Selection by a “magic circle” of grandees worked, embracing even such brilliant outsiders as Peel, Disraeli and Churchill. Selection by party primary would also have worked. Mrs Thatcher would have been followed by Mr Heseltine, Mr Clarke or, later, Mr Portillo. In his A Question of Leadership, the historian Peter Clarke remarked that Mrs Thatcher's demise “unmistakably closed an heroic chapter in the history of political leadership”. By implication, the new politics belonged to the unassuming cosiness of Mr Major and Labour’s then leader, John Smith.
Clarke was wrong. He was writing before the advent of Mr Blair. That advent proves, if proof were needed, that charisma is as necessary as ever in commanding public attention in modern politics. Acceptability to a middle-aged London club is not enough.
The Tories were never normally a death-wish party. Labour was that. Yet Mr Duncan Smith is a death wish and even he must realise it. The Tory grandees therefore have a last act to perform, before insisting that in future the leader be chosen by open party primary. They must ask Mr Duncan Smith to stand down. Mr Clarke has indicated his willingness to lead if pressed. Mr Portillo, the only Tory said to scare Labour, is still in the House of Commons. The contest that party members were denied last year should be rescheduled. There is still time before the next election. Mr Blair needs opposition, desperately.
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