POLITICS
The dangers of a resentment that dare not speak its name
NOEL MALCOLM
Mr Major was in fighting form last week, but just whom was he fighting against? 'I have little time', he declared, 'for those who say there is no difference between the Conservative Party and Labour. The modern Labour Party has become a pathetic charade. A Party led by Michael Foot's own anointed . . .' (hang on a minute — that sounds familiar)'. . . a man whose life was dedicated to fighting for socialism has now banned the very word from Labour's vocabulary. Under Mr Kinnock, socialism has become the phi- losophy that dare not speak its name.'
Now, one doesn't have to be a psychiat- rist or a La Rochefoucauld to know that the faults which most irk us in other people are often the ones we sense most deeply but cannot admit to in ourselves. Barely a few days after this speech was delivered, the press office at 10 Downing Street was letting it be known that the next few weeks would see the launch of something called `Majorism'. A whole new ism, made to order and ready for delivery in less than a month — that is faster, surely, than it would take to change the carpets at No 10, let alone the thought-patterns of the peo- ple who walk on them. And the idea that you can create an ism just by an act of will, a couple of speeches and a press release, suggests either arrogance or naivety, or both. Even Mr Heath only acquired -ites, and never really managed an ism. Shouldn't Mr Major be content to start with his -ettes, and work upwards gradual- ly from there? If Thatcherism is to be, like socialism, a philosophy that dare not speak its name, what does that make the propo- nents of Majorism — designer Thatcher- ites, perhaps?
Some of the symmetries between Mr Major's situation now and the position taken by Mr Kinnock since 1983 are obvious. But there is one big difference: the Labour leader never had to cope with a predecessor of Mrs Thatcher's stature. Socialism was not anybody's ism in particu- lar, and the younger Neil Kinnock was identified just as a socialist, not as a follower of a charismatic leader. John Major's position is more ticklish and more rattling: it is rather as if Mr Kinnock had had to carry out his revamping of the Labour Party with Karl Marx sitting on the benches behind him as the Honourable Member for Highgate.
In retrospect, it is extraordinary how Mr Major has lasted more than six months without having to give any clear sign of whether he is continuing Thatcherism or turning aside from it. This is a genuine achievement, given that his appeal to the Party was meant to be that he would continue Thatcherism and his appeal to the country was meant to be that he would offer people something different. Even Labour's publicity machine has given up its attempt to brand him as an unrecon- structed Thatcherite: the Labour efforts on that point were always a little half-hearted, and never once achieved the level of sheer virulence attained by the Tory MEP who described Mr Major as `Nicu Ceausescu' — a remark which, incidentally, indicates as neatly as one could wish just how remote some so-called Conservative MEPs are from both reality and the sentiments of their Party.
As for Mrs 'Thatcher's position, it is not so much ticklish as straightforwardly, head-bangingly frustrating. Thatcher stor- ies are to news editors what coloured cars were to Henry Ford: you can have the story you like, so long as you like 'Thatcher criticises Major' stories. As one of her advisers puts it, 'every time she does an official speech or an interview, she says lots of things in support of John Major, but those things just never get reported'. As for what she says in private, it would be a lie, I think, to claim that she has never breathed a word of criticism of anything the Government has done since she left it. But according to those close to her, her criticisms carry no animus against Mr Major, and simply reflect the concerns which one hears expressed by many people on the Right of the party — a worry here about increasing public spending, and a worry there about Europe. She has tried scrupulously not to express those worries in public: the one slip-up, a criticism of the abandonment of the poll tax, was the result of some wily oriental journalism, which got her first of all to talk about the policies she had introduced (which she is clearly enti- tled to discuss) and then got her to explain why she thought they were the best policies (which meant saying why they were better than other policies, such as the one subse- quently introduced by Mr Heseltine).
Mrs Thatcher does not need to be told that public disagreement from an ex-prime minister is, in Dr Owen's splendid phrase, the nuclear deterrent of politics: it is very effective so long as it is not used. To which one might add the obvious rider that it is also very effective when it is used, but that it can only be used once. The occasional release of small quantities of radioactive gas from the Bruges Group, the day-to-day management of which is nothing to do with her, simply does not count: one has only to imagine the effects of a big public speech by Mrs Thatcher herself, criticising the Government's policy on Europe, to see what a completely different order of mag- nitude that would involve. In fact the consequences of Mrs Thatcher going critic- al would be so grave that it would hardly make any difference whether she were inside Parliament or outside it when she did so: the television cameras will be there, wherever it is. This is the main reason why even those who want her to remain active as a deterrent do not need to plead with her to stay on as an MP.
But there is another reason too why Thatcherites should not mind if she steps down from the Commons. The longer she stays inside the political machinery at Westminster, the longer her presence re- mains (even potentially) on the benches behind Mr Major, the stronger his sub- liminal urges will be to step out of her shadow and create a Majorism which really is different from Thatcherism. Take another look at that belligerent speech he made last week. In it, he listed 'ten things we will do, that Labour will not; and ten things Labour would do, that we will not'. On the Tory list of ten Favourite Things, the first five were pure economic Thatcher- ism (anti-inflation, anti-direct tax, pro- home ownership, pro-savings, pro- personal pensions), and four of the others were things Mrs Thatcher had promoted (parent-power in schools, youth training, contracting-out, the NHS reforms). Only one item out often, the 'Citizens' Charter', was distinctively Majorite. And as for Labour's ten deadly sins, they involved either raising taxes, or creating quangos, or undoing Thatcherite achievements such as the privatisations and the trade union reforms. Abandoning Thatcherism is a luxury the Tories cannot afford. The only way they can win the next election is to remind the voters of Labour's real weak- nesses; and Labour's weaknesses consist, point by point, of its opposition to Thatch- erism's strengths. Few things in politics may be simple, but this one is.
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