WHY THE TORIES MUST MIND THEIR LANGUAGE

present, and uncertain future of his party

HAVE YOU found the ideas put about in the recent contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party exciting? You will have noticed that each candidate was offering policies better to meet the challenge. There could also have been instances when you agreed that something was a very attractive proposition around which the whole party can unite. Or still others which you felt relaxed about. But I expect our intention was clear — to offer policies for the year 2000 and beyond (and beyond being includ- ed, of course, as the year 2000 is no more than 30 months distant). And if necessary we will not shrink from reprioritising. I cite these examples, taken at random from a proliferation of commu- nication phraseology, not so much to ridicule my own party —although much of its recent conduct has been ridiculous but to illustrate its emptiness.

The debasement of language, and the concomitant suspen- sion of the critical faculty, is encouraged by 'press officers' and readily connived in by most reporters and political com- mentators. And there are unhappy precedents, all of them historically associated with the lack of confidence that accompanies rejection. In the summer of 1974, following our first electoral defeat of that year, a 'study' was commissioned by Edward Heath and Sir Michael Fraser (director-general at 32 Smith Square) which found that over a given week issues of the Sun and the Daily Mirror drew on only 2,000 separate words, in contrast to `the average educated person' who had some 40,000 at his command. It was recom- mended that the leader's speeches might attain extra 'punch' if his team of writers were to confine themselves to that same thesaurus from which the tabloid sub-edi- tors drew their vocabulary.

Thus did the party, which in former times had taken a quiet pride in Churchill's sonorous Macaulayism or Macmillan's clas- sical allusions, demean itself by substituting for their memorable sentences the lumpen monosyllables of a Central Office 'phrase- making group'. Today, although the glos- sary may have been somewhat enlarged by boosting the vocabulary of the Daily Mirror with the language of a crash course in busi- ness management, the misconceptions to which this consciously limited technique give rise remain.

I read in recent days that Margaret Thatcher was apoplectic at John Redwood's opportunistic behaviour in 'switching' to Ken Clarke; sometimes even that she was incandescent. As one who spoke to her at some length on the Thursday morning of the leadership vote, the greater part of our conversation coming after rather than prior to my declining her plea to vote for William Hague (and disclosing that I intended to abstain), I should say that she was com- pletely calm and exceptionally clear-headed — not to say cynical — about the present condition of the Conservative party and its prospects over the medium term.

This, though, is a frame of mind unsus- ceptible to the soundbite. And I believe that the very first thing the party must do to recover respect (its own as well as that of the electorate) is to avoid the soundbite. The second is to erase from both its corpo- rate memory and the thousand-strong word processors of research departments and `policy units' every sentence, phrase and word from the 1997 election manifesto. This document was the basis for a campaign in which the party suffered its worst defeat since 1832. Any hope of convincing the elec- torate that the old government were right all along, so why not switch back to them, is nil, comparable only to the repetitious three-line whips of opposition in 1974 and the peevish advocacy at that time of Stage Three (of the old prices and incomes legislation of the Heath government).

Who wrote all that stuff, anyhow? And who's paying them at present? Sack the lot. Or, in the soothing vernacular of upper management, 'Let them go.' Can we not raise our sights a little?

Myself, I cannot recall at any time in the last six weeks (or, heaven knows, during the previous Parliament) hearing reference to the three tradi- tional pillars of the Conserva- tive party — Church, Crown and nation-state. All of them are in poor shape, none is beyond redemption, although it remains extraordinary, as well as highly culpable, that we should have allowed these traditional images, historically linked in the public subconscious with the Conservative party, not just to atrophy but actually to become a source of embarrassment.

Conservatives should stop denigrating `the public sector' — Treasury-speak for a block of wage-earners to be prevented always from earning the market rate revise their attitude to public service and consider the respect properly owed to all, from doctors to firemen, who work within it, often for less reward than they could expect from a 'next-steps agency'.

A gap is opening in working-class alle- giance, for whom protection from the cal- lous 'efficiency' of the multinational or the doctrinal favouritism of a 'caring' local authority has become more important than the freedom to put a polyurethane mahogany front door imported from Korea on their council house. Such a change in bias would certainly be recognised by Ben- jamin Disraeli — so often misquoted and usually misunderstood by Tories who pray to him in support of their own conformism. It would have the advantage also of helping to destabilise the Labour party, whose own newfound commitment to the corporate boardroom and to movers and shakers, is unlikely to maintain unity throughout the life of this Parliament.

Readers familiar with George Danger- field's masterpiece, The Strange Death of Liberal England, will recall how that great party, by a combination of weak leadership, uncertain direction and political timidity, found itself, too late, to have become stranded. In the Twenties the Liberals were outmanoeuvred by Baldwin, whose inten- tion it was to reduce their status to that of a 'third' party, believing that the starker contrast between Conservatism and social- ism would ensure a perpetual ascendancy for the Tories. This he succeeded in doing to such effect that within 30 years Conser- vative tactics were stood on their head and, in the majority of constituencies, the Liber- al vote would be nurtured in order to diminish the Labour total.

A comparison with the present plight of the Conservative party is deeply uncom- fortable. The huge Labour strength appears to offer something for almost everyone but the most committed or most loyal and traditional Conservative. Just to hang around indulging in mutual preening and waiting for Labour to implode will be fatal. That still promising ground base of nine and a half million May Day Conserva- tive voters will slip through our fingers like silicone sand — and in the opinion of many judges is already so doing.

But in history there is consolation. The great landslide which buried the Conserva- tives in 1906 seemed at the time to herald a new age. In fact it was the political epitaph to the 19th century. The Liberal party, returned with so huge a majority, quite soon split and wasted away, because it no longer stood for anything — not, at any rate, for anything that could separately be identified in people's minds and inspire them.

Now in 1997 the two parties are matched less unevenly than it appears. If Labour really polled below what it did in 1992, they can hardly be said to have got much of a grip on people's emotions. The electorate, who are not stupid, were just sick of a Con- servative party that was quarrelsome, self- serving and, insofar as policy existed at all, barely distinguishable from the more obtuse tendency among its own departmen- tal officials.

The scale of rethinking needed is huge. After great defeats the party always returns to challenge the consensus. In 1950 it was `set the people free'; in 1979 the pioneering of monetarism. Today there are many start- ing points from which a radical may set out.

The party's constitution, insofar as it is codified at all, requires drastic attention. There is some talk of managerial reform (`root and branch'). Foremost appears to be the curiously self-mutilating provision that the selection of parliamentary candidates should no longer be 'left' in the hands of local associations. But if the party is to be attractive to 'ordinary' people power needs to be diffused, not further centralised. This will at first be resisted by sitting MPs, most of whom patronise their constituents and regard the National Union as a lot of jumped-up Rotarians. But even were that judgment to be valid it could be changed overnight by offering to the voluntary activists real participation in the whole pro- cess of determining policy and who shall carry it out.

And Scotland. How welcome is the con- firmation, which the election results pro- vide, that national pride can be a stronger motive than self-interest! The Conserva- tives were portrayed, however unjustly, as a party of English quislings. There is no longer any hope of their recovering, out- side the context of a genuinely independent (not a 'devolved') Scotland. Would that country be a dominion? Probably. Would it have a 'single currency' with England? Pos- sibly. The likelihood of it receiving 'soft' loans from the Bank of England and mov- ing quite quickly back into associate status is strong. But what is certain is that mem- bers of the Edinburgh parliament could no more sit in Westminster than can those from Ottawa.

Always remember that it is only 20 years since, if a Conservative thought the unthinkable — argued (say) for laws to restrain trade union power or to sell off industrial monopolies in the state sector he would have been put under house arrest by his own leadership, a fate not dissimilar from the fate of those who today draw attention to the 'problem' of unemploy- ment, and regard its solution as the prima- ry factor in creating a contented society and a bond between legislator and citizen. Still more is this true for those who argue the case in its starkest form: that no econo- my is rich enough to pay the wages of a for- eign workforce at the same time as a weekly set-aside grant to two million of its own citizens to do nothing at all — whether they wish to or not.

As a very great Conservative prime min- ister wrote, when serving his term at the Treasury: It may be, of course, that you will argue that unemployment would have been much greater but for the financial policy pursued; that there is not sufficient demand for com- modities either internally or externally to require the services of this million and a quarter people; that there is nothing for them to do but to hang like a millstone round the neck of industry and on the public rev- enue until they become permanently demor- alised.

... I realise the danger of experiment. The seas of history are full of famous wrecks. But the fact that this island with its enormous extraneous resources is unable to maintain its population is surely a cause for the deepest heart-searching.

Whether or not you are in sympathy with the Keynesian ethic that underlies these sentiments, you may at least enjoy a reminder that the acceptability of policies, and political discourse, will often be enhanced by the language in which it is expressed.

Alan Clark is the Member of Parliament for Kensington and Chelsea. His history of the Tory party in the 20th century is to be pub- lished by Weidenfeld in the autumn.