Once more, reluctantly

Patrick Cosgrave

It is necessary to return once more, reluctantly, to the tiresome question of the leadership of the Conservative Party, for some of the facts are being taken increasingly out of context; and impressions have been allowed to get abroad which are false. The main problem, of course, arises from the utter refusal of the least successful leader the party has known this century to recognise his own incompetence, and act on that recognition; and from the failure of the Conservative Party to live up to its so often exaggerated reputation for ruthlessness. It is true, as one might expect, that the press greatly exaggerated the supposed amiability of Mr Heath's confrontation with his backbenchers last week, though it is also true that the latter as a body found neither the courage nor the resolution to tell the failure to his face what they thought of him. The situation thus created, however, has other roots: it arises principally from the failure of the parliamentary party to grasp that their own standards of conduct are far higher than Mr Heath's own. "Gee," a visiting American politician observed to me last week, "that guy clings on better than Nixon." Just so; and Mr Nixon had won an election.

Mr Heath's tactics, even, may strike you as odious. Backbenchers who, a few months ago, scarcely merited a nod from him — or, if they attracted recognition, found it to take the form of a glare advertising the leader's remembrance of same trifling lack of slavish devotion — are now being taken out to dinner by a man who is striving desperately to recall all the tricks and stratagems he employed as Chief Whip. And they hear what is increasingly becoming the simple Heath message, which I might paraphrase thus: "Of course, I appreciate the need for looking again at the merits of the present system of choosing a leader, and with a view to changing it. I will even set up a committee to examine' this in the most exhaustive and thorough way possible. Then I will take a decision. If there is to be another election, I would of course stand in it. But that will probably be unnecessary, since an economic catastrophe is most likely to occur very shortly. When that happens the people will recognise that I told the truth in February and October, so they will turn to me, and we will be back in office." Nothing, of course, is put as bluntly as that; the more direct form of the message comes from the emissaries of Mr Heath; his

s own version is couched in a mixture of surly' looks and poor English which are his conversational trade marks.

The Heath thesis, however, bears — or, rather, does not bear—very close examination. Nobody denies the seriousness of the country's situation: Mr Healey emphasised and re-emphasised it in his Budget statement; and Mr Heath was far from being the only politician to use the language of coming catastrophe in the last general election campaign. There is the other little detail, which might be forgotten in a tearful recognition of Mr Heath's merits, that Labour now has an absolute majority in the House of Commons, and no likelihood of losing it (who could see a Tory now winning a by-election under the Heath banner?). But the most important single thing to emphasise is that Mr Heath, in an unjustified identification of the future of his party With his own future has striven and is striving to get the Tory Party to invest all its prospects in national catastrophe. For, even on his own reckoning of things to come, the nation must be brought to

its knees in order that he may be Prime Minister again. If it is not, if it even staggers along in the more or less inadequate way it has done for more than a decade, then the language of doom which Conservatives will have been forced to utter in the service of a failure will become increasingly destructive; and will be increasingly exploited by Mr Wilson and his colleagues, in the full knowledge that, whereas the people have a certain cheeky-chappie affection for Mr Wilson, they have none for Mr Heath.

Of course, the history of our country is bestrewn with prophets of doom who were proven right, and some of them were called to the helm when disaster struck: the most glorious of these was Churchill. But, whether by accident or design, these prophets during the period of their prophecy, sought to commit only themselves, and such brothers as were persuaded by their arguments. They did not seek or have opportunity to commit a great party to their own forevision of apocalypse. If they were wrong then they and a few friends would pass unmourned, but no further damage be done. Mr Heath asks — nay requires — that every single one of his followers lay their heads on the block alongside his. And, come to think of it, what has he done for the Conservative Party that he should feel able to ask this sacrifice of them? Mr Heath became leader of the party after a clever, ruthless and beautifully orchestrated campaign, launched in his interest, had demolished a leader who had not long previously lost narrowly an election his critics had asserted he was bound to lose by a landslide. Mr Heath then did lose an election by a landslide. He then, against the odds, won one with a reasonably comfortable majority, and on a very clear and specific programme. One by one he abandoned the principles of that programme. In particular by a resort to the printing presses with a recklessness which had never before been seen in this country, he

destroyed the reputation of the Conservative Party for being the party of sound finance, the

party that rescued the country's economy from socialist extravagance. Then, though there oar' be differences of opinion about his leading the

country into the EEC, the manner of his supposedly fulfilling his pledge not to do so without the full-hearted consent of parliament and people at least left a sour taste in the mouth. Throughout, he behaved personally with an over-weening arrogance that became unbeara

ble save to those who were his closest minions — the outriders who sought to shut up critics both within the House of Commons and

beyond, through the flattering of newspaPer

proprietors and the application of pressure to radio and television companies. At the end of all this he called an unnecessary general election in the face of an industrial dispute which he was clearly determined to settle on the disputants' terms if he got back and, deservedly, lost it.

Switching quickly from bullying to conciliation and from the tones of the ranter to those of a

craw-thumper he fought another general

election and lost that as well. Finally, and devastatingly, when he became leader of the Conservative Party it was a truly national party, really weak perhaps only in Wales. If, now has no representatives in Ulster; it is for all intents and purposes eliminated in Wales; lt

runs a poor third in Scotland; it has been shattered in the North of England, finds itself alive only south of the Trent, and is graduallY

being restricted to the South and the Home Counties. In circumstances like these, whed some Conservatives assert that the Part,r/ cannot do better than Mr Heath, one can onlY retort that it can scarcely do worse. I do not, of course, suppose, that any of this, matters a great deal to Mr Heath himself. W118;: ,Mr George Gale has called his 'angry will even more in evidence now than it ever was: is concerned only with himself, only with own survival, only with his determination not to abandon the very real comforts and privileges

afforded to the Leader of the Opposition, for an

outside world of work and anonymity which. hi!, scarcely knows, having never had a real ' outside politics and the army in his life. What,'s quite certain, of course, is that he will struge for what he has with an unrelenting stubborn; ness, storing up more and more of th,s

contempt which he has always, most reacIDY.' lavished on his party and its members for the inability to mount the challenge that will finallY unseat him—an inability founded in what Is still general bemusement at the capacity Of ail one man to behave so dishonourably.

As time goes by, however, I think there be another feeling abroad, one which will grtIs'„ and fester in party and country alike. It will beq,' feeling of fear. Gradually, as Mr Fled`i continues his embittered struggle for surviv3.1.; as he becomes more falsely bonhomous he is not being insensitively aggressive 1!I; public and in the House of Commons there

be a fear of what he would be like if fortune dloo

against all the odds, restore him to office and tt power. He was bad enough when he felt thaA

the 1970 election had proved him, unloved an:: gauche creature that he was, apparently rig11`. apparently destined to lead his country to tha!

quiet revolution of which he spoke so insinoeIr ely in Blackpool. Now, after humiliation af.,..t:t humiliation has been heaped upon him, WI'd would he be like if the spin of the wheel sh°1"1 put him back?

Not for him—it has never been his CO Churchill's recipe of magnanimity in victor). He would, in all likelihood, be far n'Ore intolerable than before. The British people havii

a good sense of the bully—as even Church' ,

found when he tried the role in 1945—and the)e know how to kick him. They have a good senhse of Edward Heath, too. And every moment t'd Tory Party allows his departure to be prolong,eth is a moment more in their identification W, him, a moment nearer their destruction a

nation al party. s