POLITICS
A voice crying (and occasionally sobbing) in the political wilderness
NOEL MALCOLM
Whether one agrees with his policies or not, there is something undeniably moving about the spectacle of a politician standing up for his principles at the ex- pense of his career. Especially, that is, when he has taken the huge and irremedi- able step of leaving the party to which he had belonged for most of his adult life. And few could fail to be moved on hearing him say, at a time when all hope must surely have been extinguished in his own heart, the following words:
They say that the secret of politics is patience. That is not a counsel of passivity or detachment. The truth behind it is that time is the great ingredient in human affairs. . . . We should keep faith that in the fulness of days a cause that is true and right will at length prevail. In life, in politics, never give up hope.
He was addressing a small audience of faithful admirers, and he ended his speech by saying: I take leave of you tonight with . . . words of hope and words of perseverance, the things without which politics is a bitter and a futile pursuit. 'I look verily to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.'
You would not expect Dr Owen to end a speech quite like that; and you would be right. The speech was delivered last week by Mr Enoch Powell, and the occasion was his return, for the first time since 1974, to the Conservative Association in his old constituency of Wolverhampton South- West. It was certainly a moving occasion for Mr Powell. There were moments dur- ing his address when something like a sob could clearly be heard creeping into his voice. At such points, he would pause for slightly longer than usual and then attack the next sentence with unexpected fierce- ness — prompting the thought that the true reasons for his sometimes ferocious style of oratory have been much misunderstood.
Occasions such as this are salutary ex- periences for political commentators, for whom the strutting of politicians on the Westminster stage is almost everything, and the relationship between an MP and his constituency remains in most cases as unexplored as the dark side of the moon. Much of what Mr Powell stood for has tended to seem as abstract and timeless as a mathematical equation; so it was good to see him rooted once again in space (Wol- verhampton) and time (1950-74). Looking at the audience with its mixture of ages and accents, its upwardly mobile young men in glossy, wide-lapelled dinner jackets and its splendid old-style councillors who asked us to be upstanding and to register our thanks in the traditional way, I was reminded that `one nation' Conservatism enjoys a stron- ger and more natural tradition in the West Midlands than it ever has in the Home Counties — where, too often, it just means patronising the lower classes.
The secret of Mr Powell's success was always his ability to combine feet-on-the- ground Midlands realism with a lofty (head-almost-in-the-clouds) scheme of principles. It is, after all, the function of a politician to act as a connecting link (in his case, a lightning conductor) between the two levels. `SUccess' may seem an odd word to use here, especially since Mr Powell himself has written, in his life of Joseph Chamberlain, that '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 Mr Powell has left a major legacy of ideas and arguments, some of which can only grow in importance during the coming years. In his speech last week he quoted the three headings of his election address of 1970 (the last time he stood as a Conservative): 'immigration', 'the Com- mon Market' and 'the socialist state'. On the first of these his failure is obvious, a matter of history: even his supporters are reduced now to saying, like the yokel in the story, 'I wouldn't start from here.' The second issue still hangs in the balance, though Mrs Thatcher's use of 'nationhood' as a key word in her speech at Bruges on Tuesday suggests that her instinctive Powellism is gradually rising to the surface. And on the third issue (the reversibility of socialism) the changes of the Thatcher, Howe, Tebbit and Lawson years have fulfilled Mr Powell's prophecies more thor- `We'll have trouble raising the cricket team without an alliance.' oughly than most writers of election addresses could ever dream of hoping.
One way of getting the measure of Mr Powell's achievement is to return to the comparison with Dr Owen. He too is a natural loner, and on some issues, notably defence, he has also shown a talent for voicing the concerns of ordinary people. In some areas, such as foreign policy towards the superpowers, his views are a good deal more realistic than the schematic doctrines which Mr Powell adheres to. Despite the sad recent history of the Alliance, it is still true to say that Dr Owen's skills as a political tactician are greater than Mr Powell's; and there is no doubt about his natural gifts as a leader of men. And yet, and yet — imagine Dr Owen in Mr Powell's present position, having finally lost his seat. Would there be any legacy of `Owenism' to which one could point, and of which one could try to gauge the progress over the coming years? The answer has to be `no'.
Dr Owen, like all politicians nowadays, professes to be a radical. He looks forward to the transformation of British politics, and praises Mrs Thatcher for smashing the old 'establishment' consensus; he even told one interviewer recently that he hoped the Tory Party would not 'slip back into cosy corporatism' after she had gone. But any- one who attempts the difficult task of Owenism (or the impossible task of ex- plaining the 'social market'), will be forced to admit that it resembles nothing so much as the old, cosy, quasi-corporatist, Cros- landite consensus of the 1960s Labour Party. 'At the national level, using the National Economic Development machin- ery, we would work in the closest consulta- tion with industry and commerce to de- velop a strategy for each sector. . . .' Not a quotation from the 1966 Labour manifesto, but an extract from Dr Owen's (and Mr Steel's) extended manifesto of 1987. And Dr Owen's remarks at Torquay about campaigning for 'a totally different way of thinking' referred to introducing prop- ortional representation, the whole point of which is to put consensus into power and keep it there.
`Consensus' means agreement, and that is no bad thing in itself. But from time to time it takes a politician such as Mr Powell to point out that what people agree to, and what they really think and want, may be quite different things.
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