Political Commentary
Who are the right ?
Patrick Cosgrave
There is in progress at the moment a struggle for the chairmanship of the Monday Club between the incumbent, Mr Jonathan Guinness, inglorious loser of the Lincoln by-election, and Mr George K. Young, once of M16, hot stuff on immigration and author of a book, Who is my Liege? Loyalty and Betrayal in Our Time, described by Mr Enoch Powell in The Spectator as "curious." At the same time rumours abound on the right. There is a rumour to the effect that a bunch of extremist Gauleiters, so far un-named, want to take over the club and remove from prospective members the hitherto not very onerous burden of making a declaration of loyalty to the Conservative Party. There is a rumour that the club, from being strong, is becoming powerful in constituencies. And there is a rumour that the rumour that 3,000 National Front members are to be invited to join the club is in fact a scare engineered by the supporters either of Mr Guinness or of Mr Young as a ploy in the election to the chairmanship. Beside all these rumours there is a fact: a number of rich men, with help from inside the House of Commons, have taken up the cudgels on behalf of Mr Enoch Powell.
Whatever is going on in the Monday Club has nothing to do with the manoeuvres of the pro-Powell group. This is an index of the club's failure. It has never succeeded in attracting and retaining the allegiance of the best minds on the right (one of which inspired the millionaires-for-Powell group). Mr Powell himself is not a member, neither is Mr John.,Biffen. Mr Patrick Maitland (now Earl of Lauderdale). resigned, as did Mr John Peyton. Mr Richard Body, last year a rival to Mr Guinness for the chairmanship, joined only to run in that race.
It is the depth and strength of feeling over immigration among its most assiduous and energetic non-parliamentary members which is proving to be the Monday Club's undoing, for it is further Widening the breach between the club and some of the most gifted right-wing economic thinkers in Parliament. The emphatic concentration of the club on the Immigration issue has drawn the attention of members away from the study of crucial issues in economic philosophy and Management. There is an entertaining story of one of the club's attempts to put together a statement of economic doctrine, When Mr Young and his allies had to be almost forcibly restrained from building the immigration issue into what was intended to be a rather technical paper. And obsessive concentration on this single, emotive (thotIgh, of course, exceptionally Potential allies of the right-wing way of Important) subject has frightened off thinking on other matters, especially in the universities. Now the main focus for such an alliance on the right is a body loosely dubbed 'Economic Radicals ', which has already, in a pamphlet called Memorial to the Prime Minister, argued most cogently in a political form the case against the collectivist and corporatist economic policies the Prime Minister has felt compelled to adopt, and is developing a substantial body of right wing thinking in a political context.
And it is the political context which is important. Such an increasingly influential body as the Institute of Economic Affairs, for example, has always, and quite reasonably, eschewed open political con nections and activities. But the Monday Club and the Economic Radicals are nothing if they are not political. The club has never decided whether it wants to act as a pressure group within the Conservative Party, or whether it wants to take the party over. As Mr Body observed when he stood against Mr Guinness, the club should always have as a chairman either somebody who was already in the House of Commons, or somebody who had no desire to go there: to have a candidate as its leader, subject to all the pressures to twist and turn between selection committee and selection committee, and byelection and by-election, which every candidate must suffer, could, he believed, seriously damage the movement.
So it has proved. Mr Guinness for some time supported the right-wing philosophy as adumbrated in the club's wholly consis tent but fairly elementary publications on the subject. But at Lincoln he appeared in the guise of a strong defender of Mr Heath's freeze and was immediately, fairly or unfairly, accused of turning his coat for temporary advantage, as Mr Nicholas Winterton was believed to have done on the Common Market in an earlier (but successful) by-election campaign. When to this charge could be added one of ludicrous ineptness stimulated by Mr Guinness's bright idea of encouraging murderers to suicide by leaving razor blades in their cells, it was difficult to avoid giving the club an image for which a polite description would be, zany.
The Monday Club is not without able, enthusiastic and energetic members. The difficulty appears to be, and is felt to be, that however rational or considered the policies it from time to time advocates, the advocacy is fuelled more by emotion than thought. All comparable pressure groups have some emotional content But they tend in time — as PEST is now doing under the leadership of Mr Keith Raffan — to develop thought as well. Sometimes, as with the Bow Group, the initial emotion disappears, and the group loses its ideological coherence. Those coming to the top within the Monday Club seem determined to use their gifts to rationalise feeling rather than to work out rational policies. One potential recruit, of large distinction in the economic field, was, I am told, put off membership by the intensity with which Mr Young spoke and argued about immigration.
Nonetheless, it is the chemistry of this combination of emotion and thinking that produces a somewhat crude affinity between the style of the club and style of Mr Powell. He is passionate on every subject which he addresses and he communicates feelings to those who admire him more effectively than he communicates thought. Like all considerable political leaders, of course, there is an ambiguous element in Mr Powell's make-up, and he allows people to follow him without bothering to explain too often what doctrines leader and followers are supposed to have in common: there is thus a struggle for his soul between different sets of admirers, and some of Mr Powell's adherents are as anxious to save him from the clutches of the Monday Club as they are to protect him from the Tory establishment.
"The trouble is," one such man explained to me, "that Dick Webster and Central Office can't distinguish between different kinds of right-winger. They percecute us all equally. If they had sense they'd see that it's the Monday Club they ought to control. The rest of us, Enoch included, think across a much wider range, are loyal essentially, and could be a great help to the party." Whether anything will come of this growing attempt to re-forge links between the non-Monday Club right and the party leadership remains to be seen. A great deal depends on Mr Powell, and on what subjects he selects, and how he chooses to handle them, when he rises next November at Swinton Conservative College — the first occasion on which he has been invited since his dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet — to deliver an address entitled, "The Conservative Government, 1970-3: a balance sheet."
Previous page
