Political commentary

The striped pants problem

Ferdinand Mount

'A rather crude fellow, don't you find?.' Teddy Taylor might well accept this description of himself by a Shadow Cabinet colleague. Mr Taylor may even take a certain pleasure in being thought cruder than he really is. The Tories' Scottish spokesman has a reputation for the kind of brash populism without which the party could never hope to hold Glasgow, Cathcart. 'On the contrary, Cathcart was a perfectly safe Tory seat before Teddy Taylor got there,' murmurs the same Shadow Cabinet colleague. Now, now, back in the knife box. There can at any rate be no doubt about the brashness and populism of Mr Taylor's latest bright idea: that the Shadow Cabinet should call for a referendum on capital punishment.

Not surprisingly, this proposal has immediately opened up all sorts of splits, fissures and tjairline cracks in the Tory Party: between hangers and anti-hangers, between people who like referenda and people who believe in the exclusive and unfettered right of Parliament to make law, between people who like Teddy Taylor and people who don't. All this can scarcely fail to make the Conservatives look even more of a messy, quarrelsome bunch. It is highly unlikely, besides, that a Bill to restore hanging would ever get through the House of Commons. Virtually all Labour and Liberal MPs would vote against it, as would a sizeable though diminishing minority of Tory MPs. The difficulties of defining who is to be hanged for killing whom are equally thorny. As Tory Home Secretaries have found by bitter experience, the prospect of hanging no less than the prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully.

The conventional view is that the electorate finds party splits highly distasteful. 'Voters are assumed to be like those bachelors who cannot bear to see married couples quarrelling. United fronts, we are told, win elections. But this is a kind of ritual, managed split which serves more as a demonstration than as a real event, and which is intended to gain votes by expressing a party's gut feelings without committing the party to a specific line of action which may be either impractical or undesirable. A quarrel about capital punishment reminds people that the Conservatives are the only party which contains a large number of hangers among its leaders. Only under a Conservative government therefore would there be any possibility at all of capital punishment being restored. This is the same argument as that once but no longer advanced by Enoch Powell for voting Labour: only under a Labour government is there any chance, even if only a slim one, of Britain leaving the EEC.

Observe the similarity of recent Conservative manoeuvrings on immigration and the trade unions. In both cases, Tory rhetoric reaches considerably further than Tory commitment. We are being 'swamped': yet we plan to erect only the most flimsy of dykes against more swamping. The trade unions are wicked bullies; but we are not going to do very much about them. Mrs Thatcher bowls a nasty bouncer, Merlyn Rees or Eric Varley thrashes at it, usually missing, the ball is untidily fielded by Jim Prior or Willie Whitelaw and lobbed back to the bowler. it is not a pretty sight. Purists doubt whether it is even cricket.

Yet the underlying question about the Tories posed or rather revived over the past few weeks is somewhat removed from these "grubby gimmicks. It is not even a question about winning the general election (Mrs Thatcher's chances of doing that are no les$. good than they were last autumn). It is a question about governing after winning.

I do not allude here to the stale question about whether the Tories would 'get on with' the trade unions. Most union leaders have now cottoned on to the fact that Mrs Thatcher does not intend to interfere with their powers and privileges or to attempt to exercise detailed control over individual pay negotiations except where the government itself is the employer. It is not the trade union bureaucracy now which dreads Mrs Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street. It is the Establishment. This dread is an emotion as fiercely rooted in the survival instinct as anything you will find in the animal kingdom. Bees stinging, skunks squirting or hedgehogs rolling themselves into spiky little balls in the glare of car headlamps have little to teach senior civil servants or /10,000-a-year quango men. The squawks, leaks and rumours frotn within the party which are now surfacing in Establishment house magazines like The Times and The Economist are only symptoms of the alarm felt throughout the network of the Great and the Good. The pious concern expressed about Mrs Thatcher's views on capital punishment and immigration — matters on

which she is essentially powerless to act — reflects a real and intense concern about what she might actually do in the economic field, unless her political authority is somehow undermined. What is now going on is a running struggle to corral her within the conventional wisdom. And the question is how far the network of 'moderate' Butskel lites and Keynesians which stretches through the Civil Service and the party machines to the government-supported research institutes and advice factories would manage to obstruct a Thatcher government in its efforts to carry out its central commitment — to reduce the role of government.

This interpretation may, at first sight, itself seem alarmist. Surely bureaucrats (party or government) co-operate loyally with any new administration; or, to put it another way, they just go on stonewalling impartially, regardless of which lot gets in.

After all, they didn't seem to mind that much when Ted in his Selsdon days proposed more or less the same things as Mar garet now proposes — less government and

lower taxes. Ah, but the difference is they never believed Ted meant it. Ted was one of

them. Like Jim Callaghan and Harold Wil

son and Hugh Gaitskell, he had actually been a civil servant. He knew the ropes. He

could be brought to understand just how impractical these absurd schemes were. But Mrs Thatcher, to add to her other terrifying characteristics, is a woman. And women are often obstinate. Imagine Dame Evelyn Sharp with political knobs on. How could one hope to impress on such a phenomenon . the importance of making haste slowly, with all due respect?

Unlike Lord GeOrge-Brown, Mrs Thatcher has not exploded into intemperate attacks on the 'striped pants' mentality. Yet she unmistakably has a striped-pants problem. For the one kind of rhetoric that is neither forgiven nor forgotten in Whitehall is that which suggests that the bureaucracy is too big. No human organisation likes being instructed to organise its own extinc

tion. And one immediate implication of the new Toryism is a reduction in the bureau cracy at the centre. Take, for example, the

'Chiswick Solution' to the National Enterprise Board. Mr John Biffen suggests that, instead of going through the laborious and controversial business of abolishing the NEB, the next Tory government should quietly run it down until it can be shoved off to 'a couple of rooms in Chiswick.' Such a removal might be good for the country, but it cannot be good for the self-respect of all

those essential public servants who have been loyally clocking in day after day at

12-18 Grosvenor Gardens, SW1 (so handY for the seats of power, Victoria Station and Overton's fish restaurant) to be told that their services are now rather less essential or no longer required at all. The bureaucracy does not defend its interests directly but rather by an oblique process of denigration which sees into the conversation of governing circles. Mrs Thatcher's economic views are seldom coherently argued against. They are merelY

described in a vague, Olympian way a,s

'simplistic' or 'superficial' or 'one-sided' This is said, with a lordly pretence of char'

ity, to be not entirely her own fault. It is her advisers who lack 'balance' or 'judgment'.

Well then, what would a complex, or profound or balanced view look like? On the

whole, one finds that it would look suspiciously like an argument for doing nothing at all.