Politics
The Liberal darling
Bournemouth
Run through the advertisements in the Gazette, which is published daily by the Liberals throughout their Assembly, and you get an idea of their characteristic preoccupations. 'Greenpeace', Liberal CND and the League Against Cruel Sports are there. So are the Child Poverty Action Group and the GLC. You are invited to hear Des Wilson on secrecy, to visit Wool- craft — 'All good knitting yarns, haber- dashery and embroidery. Special discount for Liberal delegates on proof of mem- bership', and you are asked: 'is Saffron Walden your oyster?'
The fringe meetings start at eight in the morning — 'Time to think, pray and chat!' in the Sun Lounge of the Savoy Hotel. As the day progresses, they accumulate. From 6.15 to 7.45 pm on Monday, before the Assembly had even started, there were six, including 'Standing Committee with Panel Chairs' with Clement Freud, which sounds like an impossible parlour game. Cere- monies end each evening with the Young Liberal Caucus, which starts at 11.15. There are six days of this and there can be only one explanation for it — that this is what the Liberals enjoy.
Indeed, the customary characterisation of the Tory as the smuggest of the party conferences is wrong. It is only the most deferential. The Liberals are far more interested in themselves and impressed by their own way of doing things. 'We are always lovable,' said Mr Stuart Mole, Mr St John Stevas's persecutor in Chelmsford, on Tuesday, 'but sometimes ramshackle and somewhat disorganised', which of course, in their own eyes, only makes Liberals more lovable still. If each party had to advertise itself in a lonely hearts column, only the Liberal would relish the opportunity. 'Liberated woman, 40ish, but still young at heart,' imagine it bubbling, 'seeks caring, sharing bloke for natural food, chat, fun. Looks don't matter, life- style does.' No other party believes that there is so much pleasure to be had from its company.
Which may explain Mr David Steel's slight uneasiness. Apart from the fact that he is not one of those political funsters who like nothing better than making jokes about proportional representation at two o'clock in the morning in the bars of seaside hotels, he is also someone who has seen more of the world than the view vouchsafed to many delegates here. To be more exact, he has seen far more of politics, and so cannot fail to notice the disparity between his characteristic Assem- bly delegates and the characteristics of political success. nor can he fail to be irritated by it, with the result that many Liberals, in their turn, are irritated by him. He has devoted his entire political career to trying to ensure that the Liberals have something to do, so he cannot pretend to enjoy it when, year after year, instead of doing, they talk.
In these circumstances, can you blame Dr Owen for keeping his distance from the Liberal party? Dr Owen is as interested in real politics as Mr Steel, and, unlike Mr Steel, he is also a radical. Although radical is the Liberals' favourite adjective of self- description, they are actually the least radical of all the parties because they have scarcely ever been forced to reconsider positions in the light of events. In the 1950s and 60s, new ideas came from Labour; in the 1970s, from the Tories; in the 1980s, they come from the Tories and Dr Owen. Has there been a Liberal thinker since Keynes? If so, he has kept his counsel, while his fellow Liberals have kept talking. It is quite remarkable that, ten years after the onset of 'Thatcherism', no Liberal except Jo Grimond has had anything in- teresting to say on the subject. If Dr Owen joins the Liberals, he would be less free, both to act and to think.
But although Mr Steel may feel under- standably impatient and restless — on breakfast television he actually emphasised how often he had been abroad in the past year — he must also be more confident than he was a year ago that it is worth holding on till 1988. The Alliance has done more than respectably at parliamentary by-elections (Liberal News boasts 11 coun- cil by-election victories, ten of them gains, last week alone). The opinion polls have never dropped very low, and are now high again. Nothing that Mr Kinnock has done seems to have undone Mr Foot's failures. Not even Mrs Thatcher's summons to Daily Telegraph readers to join her in the battle of Good against Evil has made the Government seem less vulnerable.
Even here in Bournemouth these facts seem to be dimly perceived. By rather narrow margins, and with ambiguities, where possible, preferred, the Liberals have voted more carefully than usual. They supported an increase in their own mem- bership fees, despite pleas about inner-city deprivation; they voted against breaking their Continental alliance with 'right-wing' parties at the European Parliament; they avoided any motion on the future of the Alliance. Mr Steel treats them somewhat contemptuously, and they resent it, but they would not seriously move against him. They do not look like a government in waiting, or even half a government — if they had to choose between Saffron Wal- den and the world as their oyster, they would choose Saffron Walden — but they are at least a little embarrassed by this fact. There remain the next four years to fill. It is this desert of vast eternity that must daunt Mr Steel. Being a man with self- knowledge, he understands that he has not got interesting things to say every week no politician, not even Dr Owen at his present peak, has that. A party like the Liberals depends on press interest for its success far more than the bigger parties. With the huge Conservative majority, Mr Steel cannot command press attention by power-broking. All he can do is Will by-elections. Mrs Thatcher has recognised this and denied him two by making two non-MPs into EEC Commissioners. So he must sit tight and look for his lucky break not from the 'Portfolio' but from the obituary page.
As he does so, he has at least to notice, though not yet perhaps to fear, the men who might like to succeed him. There is the respectable Mr Alan Beith. (Mr Steel may look as if butter would not melt in his mouth, but Mr Beith looks as if it could never even get past his lips in the first place.) There is the jolly Mr Penhaligon. But the man now attracting the smart money is Mr Paddy Ashdown. Mr Ashdown, one of those slightly fishy for- mer army officers who come on strong about peace, is dashing and Owenesque, not only, one guesses, in manner, but in a love of having his own way. At present. after only a year in Parliament, he remains the darling of the Liberal left because of his apparent unilateralism ('I prefer the word "independent"'), and unpopular with his parliamentary colleagues because he out- shines them and talks too much. But already one notices in his shifts on defence and his responsible manner the 'statesman- like' touch of the ambitious man.
At a fringe meeting on the future of the Alliance on Tuesday, Mr Ashdown pre- sented an almost perfect persona of the man of destiny who yet respected the grass roots, the supporter of the Alliance who yet wanted to exploit it to the particular advantage of the Liberals. It was a shame- less bid for future leadership, its best touch being its note of urgency, its air of excite- ment which Mr Steel is so palpably not stirring at present. Mr Ashdown quoted Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' from memory, inaccurately but con brio, to the effect that the two partners should get on with it. The audience loved it.
Not, of course, that Mr Ashdown dispa- raged Mr Steel. No — David had given the Liberals the sense of realism which they needed, persuaded them out of the wilder- ness. The only trouble was that over the past seven or so years (coincidentally, the period of Mr Steel's leadership), the party had lost its intellectual identity and mis- sionary zeal: now it was time to recover its vision, and here was Mr Ashdown ready to help. If I were Mr Steel, I should have found the occasion a little sinister.
Charles Moore
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