Political commentary

King Log's birthday

Ferdinand Mount

Sunny spring morning. High wind bundling bishops along Millbank, full of coffee and biscuits from elevenses at Lambeth Palace. Across the street Mr Eric Heffer, on his way back from Transport House, amiably hectoring elderly party walking beside him. Elderly party skips nimbly into gutter to avoid gaggle of silly foreign students, then skips equally nimbly back on to pavement, grey quiff blown up like a stormy sea-crest. Never seen a Prime Minister look better after two years in the job. Can't remember seeing a senior minister skip since I once saw R. A. Butler, just recovered from a serious operation, skip round the corner out of Carlton Gardens into Pall Mall. Rab had a spray of little white flowers in his buttonhole, lilies of the valley perhaps. Even politicians notice spring. Not all politicians are unhappy men. Not when in office anyway.

Now that the brief euphoria of the New Year has subsided somewhat, it is worth jotting down a rough assessment of what Mr Callaghan has and hasn't achieved since he captured the leadership of the Labour Party — not all that easily — on 5 April two years ago. Most valuable to the country and to the Labour Party's prospects of retaining office is the conversion to sound finance, conservative economics, fanatical monetarism, call it what you like. The Callaghan-Healey administration has balanced the books. It was the most immediately important thing they could do. But it was also the least they could do. If they hadn't, they would have been swept from office in the financial whirlwind. The IMF is only another name for political necessity. Any of the other candidates for the leadership — not least Michael Foot — would have had to do the same in Mr Callaghan's place. After all, two other supposed wild men of the left — Philip Snowden and Stafford Cripps — ended up as Iron Chancellors.

What Mr Callaghan has achieved — and there is no doubt that it is his own achievement, flowing directly from his own temperament and his view of government — is that he had deflated the pretensions of politics. He has restored government to something nearer its natural role in the scheme of things. This is not the same as saying that he has reduced the government's control over the economy or the share of national resources that it pre-empts. He has, but only as a temporary expedient to deal with the financial crisis. There is no doubt that if he won the election, he would have to respond to the pressures within the Labour Party for huge increases in government spending and control. But Mr Callaghan's specific achievement is to have reduced the gov ernment's claims on our attention.

The Prime Minister's virtue is that he does not invent crises. There are no midnight meetings at Number Ten, no breathless bulletins from the Cabinet room, no portentous gatherings at Chequers. Or rather there are all these things, but it is not suggested that they are of any real importance. Now and then, for example, the Prime Minister attends a meeting of the NEDC and the question of the 'Industrial Strategy' is raised for form's sake — but there is no serious pretence that those involved are doing much more than fill in time before lunch. Quick now, can you name the director-general of Neddy? Or the chairman of the Price Commission (No, it's not Roy Hattersley, although he wouldn't mind you naming him)? Or the directorgeneral of the CBI?

This unblushing abandonment of the assumption that government can reverse Britain's industrial decline merely by stag ing marathon public gabfests is a genuine advance. Government by instant seminar always raises expectations which cannot be fulfilled and suspicions which cannot be dissolved. Only by allowing the normal pro cesses of government and party to function as they were intended to can properly evaluated and elaborated policies emerge.

But people in Britain are so unused to seeing government exercise the physician's arts of restraint that Mr Callaghan is still greeted, particularly among old-fashioned Tories, as a miracle-worker. Tory back benchers continue to be obsessed about 'how to sink Jim'. They search for some brilliant rhetoric of exposure that will leave Mr Callaghan naked, shivering and contemptible in the public gaze.

This search seems to me misconceived because it is based on a misconception about the present Labour administration.

This misconception, entertained not only amongst Conservatives, is that the gov ernment is and is generally perceived to be a totalitarian socialist conspiracy whose full fiendishness is masked only by the reas suring presence of the Prime Minister. Take away Jim or reveal the reality behind Jim, so the argument goes, and the whole show will be totally discredited. Now it is perfectly true that if Labour wins the next election with a clear majority there is no way in which the leader of the party — whether Mr

Callaghan or his successor — can hold back from implementing a great deal of Labour's Programme, 1976. Most voters probably

have at least an inkling of this. The trouble is that the image of a government which does not exist is so much less sharp than the image of a government which does exist. It is hard not to soften the grim outlines by overprinting them with the reassuring features of the present administration. The danger in arguing that 'this Labour government may be all very well, but the next Labour government will be quite different' is that only the first half of the proposition will be remembered.

The way to discredit King Log is to attack his loggishness. As the waters settle, it is easier to see the full extent of the stagnation: production still no higher than it was in the three-day week, unemployment barely declining, with the government's job creation service as Britain's only visible boom industry, and employment in heavy industry kept up only by disastrously unprofitable deals with foreign governments and huge direct subsidies. Comparisons are often made with the 1930s. Yet even the harshest critics estimate that the economy grew throughout that low dishonest decade at an annual average rate of somewhere between 2.3 and 3.3 per cent. Even the 'ailing giants' of steel and shipbuilding began to revive in the 1930s. The standard of living outside the depressed areas grew considerably. In reminding us of these facts John Stevenson and Chris Cook in their first-rate book The Slump (Cape £8.95) do not minimise the sufferings of those who did suffer. To fall away from today's far higher standard of living is not to fall to anything like the levels endured in that generation. But there is a sense in which government critics have a right to instruct today's unemployed to 'Tell your dad'. For in the 1930s Britain was among the least badly governed nations, the least afflicted by the slump, and one of the quickest to recover from it. This time we are among the worst governed of western nations and the slowest to recover. Mr Callaghan's Easter trip to urge President Carter to reflate received the anticipated and deserved brush-off. It is too much to expect that other countries should have failed to learn the lesson that Mr Callaghan has himself learned, namely that there is no salvation through inflation. The King Log theory of economic regeneration is that the powerful economies — the locomotive economies as they are known in the jargon — should pull us out of the slum!). But the locomotives refuse to budge and who can blame them?

The real charge against this administration is not that it is a socialist government biding its time to inflict red-blooded socialism. It is that this administration acquiesces

in a degree of stagnation which would not

have been tolerated in the 1930s. There is something uniquely sluggish and secondrate about this government, some dis

piriting quality about its cynical acceptance

of the slightest political pressure which is to be found in no other post-war government,

not even the Wilson circus. I do not suggest that we would be better off if King Log retired to make way for King Stork. Bet what is wrong with this administration is not the threat of Mr Berm but the actuality of Mr Callaghan.