Are there still convicted Tories lurking in the Conservative party?
Only one thing about British politics looks like continuing for the foreseeable future. That is the continuing rise of Mr Cameron. Four points ahead of Labour in a weekend poll, and the true cause of the Liberal Democrat leadership contest, all without saying much at all; just being rather than saying or doing. It has never happened quite like this before. No politician has ever transformed his situation so completely with one ‘campaign launch’ and one conference speech. How has he done it?
The fate of the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, offers a clue. Mr Cameron has realised that convicted sex offenders are the second most unpopular group in the country after convicted Conservatives. The Education Secretary was too late in detaching herself from blame for her unpopular group. Mr Cameron acted more quickly and ruthlessly to deal with his. Since becoming leader, he has said and done nothing recognisably Conservative; nothing that Mr Blair, Mr Brown or even Simon Hughes could not have said or done. The result has been those polls. There can be no other explanation for them. The timing between his embracing the at-present-all-but-universally-accepted centre and his rise in the polls is too close.
No one who wants the Tories to win a general election in the foreseeable future should complain. There does not seem at the moment to be any way other than Mr Cameron’s. A few of us have got through all of the books so far published about the 2005 election, including the old reliable: Butler and Kavanagh, the heir to the great series which started in 1945 and revolutionised the way in which general elections are written about. One thing is clear: if the Tories could have won more votes by being more rightwing about, say, immigration and asylum, they would have done so under Mr Howard in 2005, as they would have under Mr Hague in 2001, because that is what first Mr Hague and then Mr Howard offered them. It is unconvincing for the Right to argue that the offer was made too late, after years of centrism, and was therefore seen as insincere. If we feel strongly enough in favour of a policy, we vote for it no matter how late or halfheartedly it is offered. Otherwise we cannot feel that strongly after all.
So Mr Cameron is right in his present course. There will be difficulties, though. Like Miss Kelly in slightly different circumstances, his officials will from time to time break the news to him that there are still convicted Tories in the Conservative party. Mr Maude, the party chairman, will probably organise a hysteria against them.
Mr Cameron: ‘How many of them are there, Francis?’ ‘There could be as many as ten, Dave.’ ‘That’s a lot. Who are they?’ ‘Well, there’s David Davis. He insists that he’s no threat to children. But we can’t be too careful.’ ‘I thought we’d got rid of him — by keeping him as shadow Home Secretary.’ ‘We did. But he can still get into the papers from time to time.’ ‘How come, if he’s shadow Home Secretary?’ ‘Dave, anyone convicted of Conservatism has a certain cunning. They’re just not Liberal Democrat voters of the kind we’re fooling at the moment.’ ‘Just as long as we keep fooling them, Francis.’ ‘We’re not doing too badly so far, Dave.’ Mr Cameron might not want just Liberal votes. We can imagine circumstances, after a close general election, in which he might want a more formal relationship with the Liberals. In recent years we have heard much more about some sort of merger or alliance between Blairite Labour and the Liberal Democrats. It was the great scheme of the late Roy Jenkins’s last years. He was disappointed when Mr Blair showed no interest in proportional representation once he had a huge Commons majority.
But historically most schemes for an alliance or merger involving the Liberals have been between Liberals and Conservatives. Only one was successful: the Liberal Unionist defection to the Conservatives over Irish home rule in 1886, which produced a powerful anti-Liberal force for the last years of the 19th and first years of the 20th centuries. After the first world war a Liberal-Conservative alliance was proposed for keeping out Labour and keeping in the 1918 continuation of the wartime coalition, made up mainly of Tories but led by the Liberal Lloyd George. ‘Fusion’, it was called. Churchill, a Liberal minister in that government, was for.
In the end most Conservatives would not play. Lloyd George had become unpopular. The unglamorous Tories such as Bonar Law and Baldwin overthrew him, and won a general election without him. Then to the late 1940s; various Conservatives made overtures to the Liberals about anti-Labour electoral pacts at constituency level during the Labour government, but in the event that was not needed. The Conservatives returned to power on their own.
The last significant Conservative overtures to the Liberals came from Edward Heath after the February 1974 election, when Heath tried to lure Jeremy Thorpe into coalition: a course which other Liberals prevented Mr Thorpe from adopting, since Heath had not offered PR.
But there is a bigger force working against a Conservative-Liberal electoral pact. Conservative party workers cannot stand Liberal Democrat ones. They ‘promise anything on the doorstep’, apparently. Even if there were a pact, independent Conservatives would stand in constituencies where the official Conservative had stood down for the Liberal Democrat. Much of the point of the pact would be lost.
In 1919 Bonar Law, favouring ‘fusion’ and seeking to ditch the Right, though he had been a right-winger in his time, was privately ‘certain ... that our party on the old lines will never have any future in the life of this country’ — just as Mr Cameron seems to be now. Bonar Law told the Tory party conference, ‘In the House of Commons we are working as one party. In the constituencies I am sorry to say that is not true.’ It is all proof of how the politicians at the top can only dictate events for a time, as Mr Cameron is doing. But parties remain and constantly decide the biggest things in the end, as the Labour party is now deciding education. If it were otherwise, no one would join a party and leaders could do what they liked, which is what they would want but what they cannot have; except for a fleeting time like Mr Cameron’s now.
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