ANOTHER VOICE
Why were all the Tory wiseacres so extraordinarily stupid?
AUBERON WAUGH
When, after the time of Mrs Thatch- er's tenth anniversary in office, I observed that she had never asked me to luncheon and was obviously not going to do so at that late stage, and then proceeded to urge the Tories to find a new leader, I was, of course, being facetious. It was over a year earlier, at the time of the Gibraltar shoot- ings on 6 March 1988, that I personally decided she was no longer a fit person to continue as Prime Minister. My judgment was based on little more than gossip (what we writers call personal information) about her role in the matter, but it was confirmed by the almost unqualified support she received — not just from the Sun and Sunday Telegraph but from The Spectator, too — in her putative James Bond role as executioner without trial of suspected ter- rorists. The country's opinion formers, it seemed to me, had been gravely corrupted if they were prepared to accept that the best way to uphold the rule of law in Ulster was to counter murder with murder.
I was almost alone, on the Right, in my fine pompous stand. The general feeling was that shooting was too good for them. Never mind that our only justification in Northern Ireland is that we are the legally constituted government, responsible for upholding the rule of law against murder- ers and terrorists. Mrs Thatcher's popular- ity soared, for possibly the last time until her resignation last Thursday.
Brooding about this in my loneliness, I decided that all my colleagues had been corrupted, to a greater or lesser extent, by the proximity of power. They had come to think of themselves as part of the ruling caucus. Some of them, of course, actually became part of it, like Ferdinand Mount. Others may have got no closer to it than a luncheon invitation to Downing Street, where the Prime Minister flattered them to the extent of pretending to be interested in their opinions and eliciting their enthu- siasm for her own.
Perhaps, as has been suggested, the accumulated resentment of all those back- benchers who had never been invited to lunch at Downing Street, and had never received the treatment, had some influence on the final unfolding of events, but on this occasion I am more interested in the influence of those journalists who were invited and who were prepared to indulge the illusion of being part of it all.
For the last two years it was painfully apparent to anyone living in Britain unless keeping company only with a hand- ful of right-wing journalists mesmerised by the glamour of Downing Street — that Mrs Thatcher, from being the Conservative party's greatest asset, had become its greatest liability. Her achievements were magnificent — winning three elections, smashing the unions, seriously reducing direct taxation etc — but, in the course of time, she had become a national and electoral disaster. 'Loyalty, loyalty,' cried the bread-and-butter brigade, but loyalty has nothing to do with it. You do not feel loyalty to the plumber who, having suc- cessfully unblocked your drains, proceeds in a fit of demented conceit to smash up your house — least of all if he declares he has earned the right to do so.
For the last two years, as I say, it was painfully apparent to anyone of the smal- lest intelligence that Mrs Thatcher had to go before the next general election. Her obstinate adherence to the poll tax was only a symptom of the malaise which had overtaken her. The War Crimes Bill was a more worrying manifestation of it, as far as I was concerned — due to return to Westminster for reconsideration any day now. But what worried me most was the denial of natural perception. It is a feature, as any countryman will tell you, of mad, broody old chickens who refuse to leave their clutch of addled eggs, that they are peculiarly vulnerable to foxes. This one was guarded by serried ranks of otherwise intelligent soldiers for truth: Moore, Mount, Worsthorne, Anderson, (Frank) Johnson, Hastings, even young D. Law- son, as well as by the Murdoch pack of Bushells, Wyatts and Littlejohns.
There was never the slightest chance of Thatcher leading the Tories to victory after the poll tax. But the saddest thing is that they really believed what they said. Many, if not most, of that list have laid bets with me that the Conservatives would win the next election under Thatcher. I hope I do not have to send round reminders. But they put their money where their mouths were against all the evidence of by- elections, local elections, opinion polls and common sense. Undeterred by that, they solemnly sat down to convince themselves that she was right about the Common Market, joining their voices with the moronic yelps of those for whom the issue reduced to defence of the Good Old British Banger against foreign sausages. Every time Thatcher spoke of 'national sovereignty' in relation to currency control they breathed ecstatically about Thatcher as the last great patriot. Yet it was abun- dantly plain to those of us who had not lunched at Downing Street, and did not share the lower-class preference for En- glish sausages, that all Thatcher meant by national sovereignty was her own unfet- tered discretion to screw up the economy once every four years for electoral pur- poses. Even as they applauded her patriot- ism, reckoning they had some shares in this national sovereignty, they failed to consid- er that the same unfettered discretion would devolve on Hattersley and Kaufman next time round.
Thatcher had become a menace and we are well rid of her, although there can be no doubt she was a magnificent scrapper. Not least of her qualities was the ability to brush aside the myriad pressure groups which attend upon the governmental pro- cess. That Douglas Hurd was deficient in this quality became apparent after the Hungerford massacre, when he allowed the police lobby to push him into his fatuous gun-licensing legislation.
If last week did nothing else, it provoked a wonderful article from Bernard Levin in the Times pointing out the deeper lunacy of Mr Heseltine's ambition. There were those who complained that John Major was a humanoid, and it is true that he does not seem to resemble any human being I have ever met, but perhaps we needed to be governed by a humanoid, if only to prevent reasonable men from losing their senses. But the final consideration must be that Berkeley and Home, the two dun politicians, have achieved more for the Conservative Party than their philosophic- al namesakes ever did. These leadership elections should be held every six months while the party is in power, if only for their entertainment value and to stop prime Ministers and journalists alike from infect- ing each other with the same hysterical self-importance.
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