Candidates and others

Jonathan Guinness

The new leader of the bewildered Conservative Party will not, at least immediately, be in any meaningful sense the winner. It is already clear who that is: Mr Humphry Berkeley, who had mischievously saddled the Conservative Party with the divisive system of electing their leader by the open counting of heads before himself later scuttling over to the party in whose interests he had perhaps inadvertently acted.

A compensation for the dogs' dinner which our party has made of the leadership affair is the fascination, on several levels, of seeing so many of our leaders spell out their thoughts in the public press. One could assess them, perhaps, as never before; and this was of interest not only to the politically prurient, but also to anyone who cares for this country and believes that its regeneration must come from within the Conservative Party.

Mr William Whitelaw in the Daily Express said least. He expressed himself in balanced bromides like quadratic equations, adding up to nothing. He was concerned about the party and the country, but refused to be depressed. Tories must "fight the Government's dangerous and divisive measures." But on the other hand we must support "measures which we believe to be in the national interest." There's a word for the young: we must convince them "that we have a real sense of purpose in trying to help tackle the problems facing our country." We must improve the nature of our society — while preserving what we know to be the best in it. Rhubarb, rhubarb. Yet the people I canvassed at the last election who refused to vote Conservative because ofMr Heath tended to specify Mr Whitelaw as the man they wanted. Perhaps some people really do want a leader to produce nothing but reassuring noises.

Mr Robert Carr wrote in the Daily Telegraph. He no doubt agrees on most things with Mr Whitelaw, but differs in possessing the gift of clarity. However, there is again this hedging. The great strength of the Conservative Party, he says, has been our lack of ideology; yet he goes on to make the ideological point that we must resist the encroachment of state-dominated socialism. "We belong," he also says, "to the middle of the road and let us never forget it." But to the middle of what road? The edges of our political road in this country are respectively Conservative freedom and Socialist regimentation; so a move towards the middle must be a move towards that which Mr Carr would resist. Again, he approves of the self-employed getting together to protect their interests but he will not have the Tory Party supporting one class rather than others.

Mr Hugh Fraser had his say in the Times; perhaps the editor wanted to make amends for the letter-writer who compared him with Caligula's horse. If he must be compared to an animal, I should rather say Mr Powell's poodle, and a woolly one at that, but in fact some of his analysis of the leadership's mistakes was not bad. Yes, the Tory leadership did indeed confuse, rather than reconcile, its twin tasks of defending its natural supporters and transcending them, when necessary, in the interests of the whole nation. Even truer is this: "By creating a Tory Party which is monolithic and unbending we have found no room for independent voices." But the connection of most of the article with the real world was tenuous. He believes in laissez-faire. "Failure must have its penalties and success its rewards." Failure? Is this the right word for someone who has the misfortune of working in an industry where free collective bargaining has forced redundancies? Again, he described the CBI and the TUC as "essentially anti-parliamentary, and on analysis totally bogus, centres of power," being himself against the concept of a corporative (sic) state. But if the TUC's power or at any rate the collective power of the unions, is so bogus, what made the Industrial Relations Act, as he later says, "unworkable?" Mr Fraser was the • preferred candidate of Mr Paul Johnson, but then I might suggest Lord Chalfont as Labour leader, mightn't I?

Sir Keith Joseph sees the two crucial problems as being inflation and the family. The Conservative Party has strayed from its principles and taken to semi-socialism. "The public is ready to be convinced that current tax levels are counter-productive; that profits (legally earned in fair competition) are a good thing for all concerned, the ally of the social services; that artificially induced booms lead to real slumps; that trade unions which try to obstruct progress are keeping us all worse off; that local government spending is too high and should be curbed; that people who save should be regarded as friends, not enemies; that men are unequal by nature and hence that unequal rewards are fairer than fair shares to worker and shirker alike." Hence taxation could be cut, as could government spending on indiscriminate welfare for individuals and firms which encouraged people to depend on the state and companies to be inefficient and over-manned. The family should be in the centre of our thinking; trendy education and the denigration of authority and the family lead to truancy, delinquency and violence. All good stuff; but containing no clue to a method of tackling the actual power relationships in society.

Mrs Thatcher's art is to make it appear that the Conservative Party is the only party any reasonable person can support — which is half the art of being a Tory leader. The other: inspirational side is lacking so far. Her strongest point in the Telegraph was to turn on its head the common left-wing argument that the values of our society, defended by Conservatives, are middle-class values. It was, as she rightly said, insulting to working people to regard them as being indifferent to a concern for order, or for freedom, or for educational variety and excellence, or for distinguishing in welfare payments between those in real need and those who swing the lead. I should in her place have mentioned a concern for national identity, because this is a value which tends to be actually stronger among working-class people than among many sections of the middle class.

Then we have Mr Heath; let's give him the last word. He showed his worst side in the Sunday Express of January 26, and then forced me to re-write this article by showing his best side on February 3 in the Daily Telegraph. I'll almost, but not quite, draw a veil over the Express piece by merely quoting the last sentence but one: "So let us all as individuals say: This is the year in which we, the people, are going to turn Britain round and set her on a course of hope." (His italics.) Yes, do let's say this; as individuals, every morning, before our daily dozen. Oh dear.

Suddenly, though, he said in the Daily Telegraph a lot of the right things. The Conservative Party's aim, he said, is balance and harmony, which means correcting imbalance. None of Mr Carr's "middle of the road" inanity here. In the past this balance has meant supporting various interests: monarchy against the encroachments of oligarchy, country against the inroads of the industrial interest,

etc. Today the interests of the whole need protection against the industrial power of the trade unions which Mr Heath admits his

government failed to provide. "It would be surprising," he said, "if we had succeeded at the first attempt." Well, it wasn't the first attempt, and Mr Heath made serious tactical mistakes; notably performing his famous `11-turn towards a statutory incomes policy without making sure that this came across as 3

commitment to an idea of fairness. Yet Mr Heath, with all his faults, recognised, as his opponents, with all their virtues did not, that the idea of total free enterprise and totally free collective bargaining means the elimination of ethics from economics, the legitimation of extortion. Freedom implies the obligation of forbearance and a function of government is to ensure such forbearance. This is why Conservative thinking has got to be on the lines of a genuine social contract, an

agreement by all interests on relativities in a common moral framework; an idea confusedly referred to, rather than expressed, by Mr Heath when in the election he advocated the televising of meetings of the NEDC.

The disaster of Mr Heath is that he has expressed the right ideas badly and without any flair. Europe is another example of the same fault which is now in danger of actually losing us our membership of the EEC. He despises advice; he uses the Central Office to reduce the Tory membership of the House of Commons to monolithic mediocrity. In office it was the first miners' strike, more than the second, which

showed his obstinacy; he used public owner; ship of the mines to convert, for one set 01 admittedly underpaid workers, a purely voluntary incomes guideline into a compulsory policy. But how nearly he was, and could be, a great innovating Conservative leader.

We have to hope now that Mrs Thatcher, having won, will be susceptible to persuasion from within the party to take the right measures. Jonathan Guinness was formerly chairman of the Monday Club