THERE ARE TIMES when you are so obviously in the right, and your accusers have
so obviously blundered, that you can afford to bow out without a word. For
Howard Flight to step down quietly now would set the seal on his moral
victory. It would show he is a bigger man with a steadier sense of his
party’s overriding interests than some of the voices raised against him.
The damage done to the Conservative cause in this general election by Michael
Howard’s weird rush of blood to the head a week ago cannot now be undone,
but it can be cruelly aggravated. There is one man capable of aggravating
it: the victim himself, Howard Flight.
I do not know Mr Flight well but in the past I have met and talked with him at
some length. He is clever, intense and patently sincere. He is nothing like
the stuffed shirt or City booby of some recent caricatures. If I had a
criticism I would choose a word once used of the late Keith Joseph:
“unworldly”. Mr Flight is an ideas man, an expert, with a tendency to narrow
his focus to his area of expertise, shutting out the periphery. He has
displayed the kind of endearing blindness to the way things will play in the
big, bad world outside which is often shown by men who find ideas
interesting. Politics is an uncomfortable business for them.
Nevertheless he had chosen politics as his career. Peripheral vision matters
for a politician, especially during an election. It is always naive to trust
that what one says will not be reported, or not be reported out of context;
and complaints that Labour may have “spied” on that Conservative Way Forward
meeting ring hollow. So what if Labour did spy? Good luck to them. If the
Tories have no spies in the Labour camp then they are missing a trick. This
is an election. This is war. I can well understand Michael Howard’s rage
that at so critical a moment one of his team should have been so incautious.
The rage will have been compounded by the realisation that that infamous
report has given rise to a suggestion which is (a) untrue (b) personally
defamatory of Mr Howard and (c) completely impossible to bury, now that it
is up and running.
There is a world of difference between a private hope and a secret plan. Amid
the thunder of a general election campaign, however, any attempt to explain
it is doomed to sound Jesuitical. There is a world of difference between the
assertion that many Tories trust that in time a Conservative government
would find that there is scope for bigger savings and tax-cuts than the
party has so far identified — bejaysus, there had better be — and the
assertion that a secret plan exists to do this; but try to hammer that
distinction home during three and a half minutes in the ring with Jim
Naughtie or Jeremy Paxman, and you might as well save your breath. Having
lost that round, you are then defenceless against the suggestion that the
party leader is hiding something.
No wonder Michael Howard was spitting blood. There is no secret plan and he is
hiding nothing, and he was well within order to sack Mr Flight as a
spokesman and deputy chairman. However hurt and misrepresented Mr Flight may
have felt, he will have understood at once why.
The second stage of the Tory leader’s rocket has, however, misfired badly.
That is Mr Howard’s fault, and the fault of those who advise him.
Mr Flight’s behaviour had come nowhere near crossing the borderline that
triggers expulsion from the Conservative Party. He had made a serious
misjudgment but he had never meant to imply that Mr Howard was a liar, and
nobody thinks he did. Nor are his views outside the range of mainstream
internal debate among Tories — as were, for instance, those of Adrian
Hilton, the now-sacked prospective Conservative candidate for Slough, who
thinks the EU is some kind of papist plot. The frequency with which my
telephone has been ringing for a week testifies to the difficulty news
broadcasters have encountered in finding any Conservative prepared to defend
the destruction of Mr Flight’s whole parliamentary career.
There are two possible explanations for Michael Howard’s lashing out like
this, and I hope it is the first which is true: that the Tory Leader had
some kind of brainstorm and, ignoring the stammering counsel of his
terrified advisers and whips, kicked down the door of unspoken understanding
which protects backbenchers’ rights, and stamped on Mr Flight’s head.
If this is what happened, then all we are dealing with is a leader with a very
short fuse and a violent temper. That is a fault to which some leaders,
including some great ones, do seem to be prone. The danger can be contained,
as advisers and staff develop techniques for cordoning their man off during
these fits and soothing him into sleeping on decisions. Mr Howard is proving
a capable leader, so I dare say we can take the rough with the smooth and
learn how to live with the occasional tantrum.
Slightly more worrying is the possibility that Mr Howard was got at by the
“modernisers” — the Notting Hill set — who genuinely allowed it to enter
their tiny minds that the Howard Flight affair could be their Clause 4, the
contrived showdown which dramatically demonstrated their mastery of policy
and personnel. As Tony Blair himself so vividly demonstrates, people who are
a bit hazy about what they do believe will seize with a mixture of violence
and relief on something they don’t. Mr Flight was after all talking about
that new Tory taboo, the great no-no among modernisers, the thought which
dare not speak its name: shrinking the State and (heavens-to-Betsy!)
cutting taxes. “Swat him,” Notting Hill may have suggested to Mr Howard,
“and you squash a whole nest of heretics, and show the world who’s boss.
Thus will we showcase our beliefs.”
I would be more concerned about the Tory modernisers’ beliefs if they had any.
They like to talk about “choice” in health and education, but if that does
not mean involving the private sector I don’t know what it does mean. They
talk about “cutting waste and bureaucracy” but if that doesn’t mean taking
on the front-line public servants — doctors, consultants, teachers, nurses,
police officers — then they are not being honest. Their doctrine has that
Chinese-meal quality: it all sounds good as they explain it, but after a few
hours you can’t remember what it was. I don’t think their doctrine amounts
to much more than that they’ve become a bit jumpy about the Conservative
Party being portrayed as indifferent to the quality of public services — but
there may be more to it.
Meanwhile we can be sure that, with or without Mr Flight, the small-state case
will take care of itself. I might as a Conservative shake my head in
bewilderment that my party is not screaming blue-murder when take-home pay
is actually shrinking during a period of strong economic growth; I might
recommend Gordon Brown to rewrite the story of Jacob’s dream in Genesis if
he is to justify squandering corn during the seven fat years; but my Tory
ideology gives me confidence that as growth falls and taxes bite, the case
against a bloated public sector will rise again.
And so will Howard Flight. Either the Conservative leader’s temper or the
Conservative leader’s friends in London W11 have let him down and he has
needlessly prolonged an embarrassment which would otherwise have died by
now. Only Mr Flight can protect the Tory campaign from further embarrassment
in the next two weeks.
Howard Flight is entitled to his association’s extraordinary general meeting
in Arundel & South Downs. If he uses it to concede not an inch of moral
ground, but to thank his former helpers for their support and in the
interests of the Conservative campaign to bid them farewell, his magnanimity
and good grace will not be forgotten.
