GETTING READY FOR THE FOURTH TERM

Ferdinand Mount surveys the action Mrs Thatcher

has taken since the election and the chances of the Opposition to turn the tables before the next

A CATHEDRAL hush falls over the Council Chamber at Broadcasting House. The Assistant Director (Talks) desists in mid-sentence from his efforts to explain the perestroika of Radio Three to the Deputy Assistant to the Associate Director-General. The Man Who Props Up The Bar at the BBC Club swears under his breath. Only Mr Jimmy Savile, ear- phones clasping his hair, eternally the bristle yellow of a Van Gogh cornfield, continues to watch the TV monitor with his unchanging smile of holy innocence. For the rest of the election night party, nothing will ever be the same again. Mr Roy Jenkins has lost Hillhead. Oh well, as Mr Enoch Powell wrote in his lapidary epilogue to his life of Joe Chamberlain: 'All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.' But some failures are bigger than others. And it cannot be said that Mr Powell himself has prospered any better than Mr Jenkins. Indeed, from a longer perspec- tive, I suspect that of these two most formidable of post-war Parliamentarians (Mr Jenkins naturally at his best on the front benches, Mr Powell inseparable in one's mind now from the gangway seat one row from the back, pale-faced, eyes half- shut, thin mouth hovering between irony and contempt), Roy is more content with what he leaves behind than Enoch. It should be some consolation to the illuminati of the BBC and to the gloom- struck letter-writers to the Guardian that the third Thatcher Government poses no greater a threat than its predecessors to any of the 'permissive' reforms of the Jenkins era — divorce, abortion, homosex- uality, obscenity, capital punishment. In- deed, the Thatcher era has added to these the virtual extinction of corporal punish- ment in schools. By contrast, most of Mr Powell's causes lie in ruins as he departs the scene, not without that gaiety which has characterised his best moments. For this election finally cemented British membership of the Community — all the antagonism of Labour's 1983 manifesto

was gone. The last chance of unseating the Anglo-Irish Agreement was a hung Parlia- ment, and that did not happen. From the Irish side, the return to power of Mr Charles Haughey has, as Mr Garret Fitz- Gerald predicted to me, 'made a hell of a lot less difference than you would im- agine'. And as for immigration, there is less prospect than ever of any government- assisted programme of repatriation, and four really quite black MPs have been elected to the House of Commons. Immig- rants were far more conspicuous in all parties this time than ever before. The slow mysterious process of integration is unmis- takably under way (which does not mean there will not be a nasty riot tomorrow). It may seem ironic that a Prime Minister of decidedly nationalist inclination should have managed, whether intentionally or not, to soften the harder edges of national- ism, but it would not be the first time that has happened. How much easier the French are in the post-de Gaulle era. Whatever else it may portend, the 1987 general election certainly does not confirm the iron either-or which Mr Powell also posed in his Chamberlain epilogue: 'Even in its attenuated form of a customs union or preferential trading block, a federation is a nation — a sovereign political unit or it is nothing.'

Politics, like life, is full of in-betweens. Nor is it the case that the in-between party is done for, merely because it lost two or three per cent of the popular vote. The Gang of Four may be reduced to a Gang of One, and even the One seems disen- chanted and fractious. Yet their achieve- ments are still not to be sneezed at.

By splitting the opposition, they have not merely enabled a Conservative Gov- ernment to win two more elections, they have so enfeebled the Labour Party that the Conservative Government remained self-confident enough to become more radical rather than less as time went by. If Mrs Thatcher had faced a united opposi- tion, there is no doubt that she would not have dared to tackle rent control or the state education system. In a curious unin- tended bargain, she has made the country safe for social democracy, and the Social Democrats have made the country safe for her.

The new Cabinet. Mrs Thatcher's reshuf- fle is an underwhelming event. There is a lot to be said for making as few changes as possible at the top. Her appointments after the 1983 election — Leon Brittan to the Home Office, John Gummer as Party Chairman — did not turn out brilliantly. I particularly welcome the lack of a dynamic new initiative-laden Secretary of State in Northern Ireland. Still, it cannot be denied that the new Cabinet is scarcely glamorous, not much gifted with the gab. The Tories' three most eloquent speakers — Mr Bif- fen, Mr Tebbit, Mr Heseltine — are no longer in it for different reasons, and will all be missed. With hindsight, I am not surprised that Mr Tebbit has chosen to retire from centre stage. Even before the election, he was showing signs that he had lost his old enthusiasm, and Mrs Margaret Tebbit does seem quite a bit better, which, although it may • sound paradoxical, is rather a good reason for spending less time sitting in endless Cabinet committees, the most wearing and ill-organised side of Whitehall life. As for Mr Cecil Parkinson's return, if it makes him happy and it makes her happy, I see no harm in it. And it surely ought to cheer up the Guardian letter-writers too. Whatever became of the sanctimonious side of Thatcherism?

The only notable promotion is that of Mr John Moore to the DHSS. He is thus elevated to the status of principal candi- date of the Thatcherite wing if the succes- sion is to jump a generation to the 45-to- 50-year-olds, just as Ken Clarke — moved noticeably sideways in the reshuffle — is obviously the candidate of the Wets. In any contest between the two, I would fancy Mr Clarke's chances. He is more aggressive and more convivial. Mr Moore is prettier, but that is not necessarily a quality likely to endear him to other Conservative MPs, so many of whom conspicuously lack it.

In any case, I suspect that this Wet-and- Dry stuff is becoming as arcane and out of date as the distinction between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. All the likely candidates are really members of the Careerist Tendency, as are their seniors in the over-50s, such as Kenneth Baker and Douglas Hurd. Sir Geoffrey Howe remains available for the Alec Douglas-Home role, while Sir Michael Havers enjoys himself on the Woolsack in the meantime.

The inner-city offensive. However, I see no reason to assume that Mrs Thatcher has any such contest in mind for the near future, or even for the middle distance. Her new mission to the inner cities pro- vides fresh fields to conquer, new dragons to slay. The only remarkable thing is that this is the first time such a mission has been launched as a party political offensive as well as a Government rescue operation. Mr Tebbit has a long way to go before he rebuilds the great machines so lovingly tended by Alderman Salvidge in Liverpool and the Chamberlains in Birmingham.

Twenty years ago, Conservative Party officers in city centres still had a certain lingering majesty; they possessed large, echoing premises, dining-rooms lined with aldermanic portraits, even some family silver; they insisted on their independence from the surrounding area offices. Their decline is indeed parallel to the decline of other city institutions — the county consti- tutional club, the local family bank, even the local literary and philosophical society. The decay of provincial city culture was until recently a subject almost wholly neglected, except by Michael Heseltine. It is another example of Powell's Law of Failure that Mr Heseltine too is not to come into his own.

The Opposition in the new Parliament. Any fool can see what the Opposition parties ought to do. The Alliance will have to merge, or at least set up a single leadership apparatus. And however cheesed off Dr Owen may be at the moment, it will have to be him, and not David Steel or Paddy Ashdown, who leads it; otherwise, the whole feeling of an Alliance would melt away and we would be left with a slightly battered and overgrown Liberal Party. Indeed, I suspect that the messages of disenchantment relayed from Dr Owen's tent by his diligent Patroclus, Mr John Cartwright, are designed to en- sure precisely this outcome. If he didn't sulk a bit, Liberals would blithely assume that the Social Democrats would be a pushover.

All this must be done quickly. In con- trast, Labour's revival depends, I think, on a sustained perestroika which gradually drops the pointlessly unpopular policies. What, for example, is the purpose of their diluted renationalising of British Telecom and British Gas? These are economic heights which command nothing. And I am sure that Mr Kinnock could safely call the trade unions' bluff on secondary picketing. Similarly, by the time the next general election comes along, ballofing for union officials and before strikes will be so completely entrenched that Mr Kinnock might just as well leave the present law in place, since it will scarcely be invoked at all. There remains only the Bomb and the Left to be dealt with. Only.

This Parliament is uniquely difficult to the Labour leadership, not only because of the huge size of the Left, which on most definitions now constitutes a clear major- ity, although the softer part of it will still be large enough to deliver a majority for Mr Kinnock if he does not push them too far. The problem which Attlee, Gaitskell, Wil- son and Callaghan did not have to face is that many of the new hard-Left MPs were notorious national figures long before they were elected. Whatever Ken Livingstone 'Maybe we can get help if we claim to be underprivileged inner-city dwellers.' or Bernie Grant says can be immediately translated into headlines. Thus dissent or dottiness which might otherwise be brushed aside as marginal to the main thrust of Labour policy will be on the front page of the Daily Mail the next day. But then nobody ever claimed that leading the Labour Party was fun. The fourth term? Mrs Thatcher scored a thumping victory. Neither of the Opposi- tion parties looked remotely like an alternative government. On the basis of the evidence so far, some sprightlier com- mentators have forecast that Labour can- not win the next election either and that the Alliance is finished.

But the Conservative ascendancy derives from the fact that over the past ten years only the Conservatives have been demon- strably in tune with the realities of Britain's position and the aspirations of Britain's voters. That sole occupancy will not last for ever. Even the Labour Party is capable of learning new tricks. If Mr Kinnock can somehow fudge the defence issue and in other respects manage to 'normalise' the Labour Party's policy, then a new consensus might well seem to have grown up, and another five or ten per cent of voters might well lose their fear of a change of government. This may all seem rather remote at the moment. The Labour Party still looks irredeemably unelectable. But then so it did to an earlier generation of Tories who were as reluctant to believe the evidence of the infant Gallup poll as the present generation were easily panick- ed into believing some of Gallup's more recent results. Was not that chap Cripps a total Bolshie? Surely the voters must heed Churchill's warning about the Gestapo• Surely Mr Attlee was too dim.

If the controversies of the present --- defence, the market economy, Europe --- begin to fade, then the issue of the under- class, the poor, the inner cities, however you care to describe it, may at last assume that sense of political life which it has so far lacked, because there was no plausible opposition party to breathe life into it. Mr Kinnock, in his now traditional eve-of-poll emotional appeal, repeated his sentiment of 1983, that if the Tories were re-elected, 'I warn you not to be ordinary.' The trouble is, of course, that it is the Conservatives who represent the ordinary, while Labour spokesmen come from and speak to declining classes, with values which are alien to the overwhelming majority. Mr Kinnock is still young and full of beans. If — that is a huge if — he can make the Labour Party more ordinary, then the frustration and tedium accumu- lated by 12 or 13 years of Conservative government might well give him at least a sporting chance.

To put it in terms of figures, I would not care to be a Conservative leader going into the next election with registered unem- ployment standing at much over two mil- lion.