IN LONG-GONE DAYS when young ladies used to embroider improving clichés on to cushion covers, the choice of homily, typically enlivened with errant capital letters, was confined within a rather cosy range.
Home Sweet Home was a favourite; so (festooned with embroidered violets) was
Patience is a Virtue. Many were the homilies but all shared this: they embodied happy thoughts.
Which is a pity. Because if I had the skill to embroider, my cushion-mounted timeless truth would read Give a Man Enough Rope and He’ll Hang Himself. Framed in coils of stitched rope, the text would be ornamented with funereal lilies and an embroidered noose.
That people are their own worst enemies may not be a happy thought but I’ve always found it a comforting one. Once you realise that, in time, and given enough quarter, others will defeat themselves, you can relax; there is no need to intervene.
It follows that, as the parliamentary season rolls onward to the summer recess, I had been feeling increasingly mellow about British politics. What need for commentators to rage about the madness of King Tony, the incompetence of John Prescott or the incoherence of Gordon Brown? Labour isn’t working, the world can see as much, and the Labour leadership are tying the nooses round their own or each other’s necks.
But now a new fear grips me. They are doing it too fast. In the imagination of a Conservative-inclined commentator such as me, the danger grows that they will have strung themselves up by the end of next year. And the awful prospect looms that the Tories may actually win the next general election — and win it outright. This would not be a good idea at all, for all kinds of reasons.
Labour needs years more to fail: to fail properly, definitively, agonisingly, indisputably, unforgettably, big-time and long-term. A premature Tory victory risks rescuing them from this. And the Conservatives need more time to finalise — and then to internalise and to embody — a philosophy and programme for change.
Before you laugh that off, permit me an immodest reference to a column that I wrote on this page in May 2004, six months before the last US presidential contest: a column to which I think time has not been unkind. It was entitled “Why I will be rooting for a George Bush election victory”.
The argument was not tongue-in-cheek. A narrow win for John Kerry would have been a disaster for the cause of reason and moderation in America. This was not only because Senator Kerry — burdened by intelligent doubt — was an uninspiring standard-bearer, but because the President and platform he was challenging formed an ambitious and clearly defined project that needed to run its course and fail (and be seen to) before it could be buried. I argued that neoconservatism had to be given its head, and crash, and burn, before a new president could persuade the nation to turn its back on the idea. Otherwise it would be said that George W. Bush had started out on a brave journey, only to have his crew — the American people — lose heart and mutiny before the outline of the new continent for which he was making appeared over the horizon.
That can hardly be said now. When, after eight years, President Bush goes, only the crazed will be able to claim he never had a fair crack of the whip. Among the many reasons to welcome the destruction of Abu Musab al- Zarqawi this week is that we can see how far his removal will vindicate Mr Bush’s strategy of combating “terror” by killing top terrorists, and his belief that al-Qaeda are at the root of the insurgency in Iraq. If so, that insurgency should now begin to abate. Otherwise another neoconservative “ah but”, and “if only” can be discounted.
Implicitly, every incoming leader is saying “here’s how: let me try”. There is much to be said for letting them — even by going into extra time. When Margaret Thatcher and then John Major finally fell, there was little wriggle-room left for Tory “ah buts” or “if onlys”. Thatcherism may not have been tested to destruction, but Conservative government had; Britain was heartily sick of it. This gave Tony Blair and his new Labour project the same flying start that the Tories themselves had enjoyed when they arrived after an era of disastrous Labour government. In 1997, as in 1979, incoming administrations benefited from a palpable sense of the failure — prolonged failure — of their predecessors.
If it is to take the brave and perhaps harsh steps that may by then be called for, the next Conservative administration will need, fixed firmly in the national imagination, vivid images of the absolute failure of its predecessor. Mrs Thatcher could wave the “winter of discontent” and the unburied dead; Mr Blair could wave the poll tax, the Conservative Party’s civil war on Europe and “Tory sleaze”.
What can David Cameron wave? Only an ambiguous tangle of statistics about public service delivery, a slighting reference to “spin”, and John Prescott’s trousers. Iraq is double-edged for Tories because they always supported the war. Though it is true that an air of arrogance and incompetence (and what The Times has called “moral dishevelment”) does begin to hang around this administration, these are early days. Abiding failure needs more time to bed in. Public scorn needs to grow. A yearning for change must take deeper root. I do not yet sense on the streets those feelings of near-revolutionary fervour and disgust that characterised the Britain of 1978-79 and 1996-97. At present it feels more like weary cynicism.
Mr Cameron’s government will need in the bank more than a weary cynicism about his predecessor at Downing Street. He may quickly be required to take potentially unpopular measures, as Mrs Thatcher did. Public spending may by then have hit the buffers, cuts may be needed, jobs may be shed, economic growth may take a temporary knock: and a Conservative Cabinet will have to move Tony Blair’s half-beginnings at public service reform fast forward. Such ideas will be fiercely contested. Is there yet a national appetite for (or public trustfulness in) new manifestos from new politicians? And are the Conservatives ready as a team to set one out clearly and recommend it confidently?
My anxiety is this: that Tony Blair will go before the end of next year, or perhaps sooner; that Labour will have been trailing the Tories in the polls for more than a year; that Mr Blair’s successor may struggle on, or take a gamble and call an early election; but that in either case the Conservative Party will within a few years have won a narrow overall majority and be constitutionally obliged to form a government.
Could that not prove a false start? How much of a new beginning, how much of a fresh mandate from the people, would a Labour loss of 30 seats to the Tories feel like? My fear is that Mr Cameron’s team will be neither ready for the fight, nor for the storms that will soon hit such an administration; and that they will feel embattled from the start, lose divisions in the Commons, lose by-elections and, after a couple of years of having never been secure enough to take a crack at things, wobble out of government.
Better by far to lose narrowly this time; better a hung parliament. Better (should Labour be fool enough to choose Mr Brown) to stand aside as that dream team of a coalition, Mr Brown and Sir Menzies Campbell, two old men from Fife, flounder through the wretched months preceding a second general election; better the Tory landslide that would follow.
The present Tory leader wants to fight Gordon Brown at the next election. David Cameron thinks that with Mr Brown as Prime Minister the Conservatives might actually win outright,first time. My fear for Mr Cameron is lest he prove right.
