Harold Wilson’s old friend and adviser Lady Falkender once observed that while left-of-centre journalists always
Posted in General on 22. Oct, 2010
Harold Wilson’s old friend and adviser Lady Falkender once observed that while left-of-centre journalists always seemed to be leaning over backwards to be fair to the Conservative party, right-wing journalists also seemed always to be leaning over backwards to be fair to the Conservative party. Suddenly everyone in the media is leaning over backwards to be fair to the Conservatives.
Let me put my hand up right away – if the bodily metaphor permits a further contortion. I leant over backwards long ago by suggesting on the weekend of Iain Duncan Smith’s election to the leadership that his task was nowhere near as daunting as the one faced by Neil Kinnock in the 1980s. Nearly a fortnight ago I was leaning over again, detecting fresh signs of life in the corpse of the Conservative party.
Even so, the accolades whirling around the leadership of Mr Duncan Smith and his Shadow Cabinet are getting silly, almost as silly as the premature obituaries of the Conservative party. Like an overcrowded yoga class, there is too much leaning going on.No group is more surprised than the Conservative leadership, which cannot quite believe the change in the way the party is regarded. Virtually every statement from a member of the Shadow Cabinet is being greeted as a revolutionary leap forward. When Oliver Letwin, the shadow Home Secretary, proclaims the importance of decent neighbourhoods, he is hailed as a philosopher king. Mr Duncan Smith’s proposals for the Lords have turned him into a noble defender of democratic rights (as I predicted they would when the Government published its own hopelessly undemocratic and incoherent package). Michael Howard, the shadow Chancellor, is enjoying a new lease of life, celebrated as an enlightened centrist with new, conveniently unspecified priorities over “tax and spend”. If a Conservative declared that the grass is green and the sky is blue we would all salute a new and radical approach to the environment.Something interesting is happening, but it is far too early to conclude that the Conservatives are on the verge of a recovery or a move towards a more fruitful centre-ground.
There are some tentative signs of fresh thinking, but so far the new policies – the proposals for a second chamber, for example – are not linked to clearly identifiable principles, while the principles are not linked to any clear policies.Take the policies that have been adopted since the election. It is a myth that the party has a policy of having no policies. On the international front Mr Duncan Smith has been firmly specific, announcing already that he would support a US attack on Iraq That is not exactly a move on to the centre-ground. Indeed it is quite something, proclaiming a strikingly hawkish position before the President himself. As for Europe, the new Conservative leader has hardened the party’s position against the euro while he personally has maintained that he will be opposed to entry forever.In a newspaper interview last week Mr Duncan Smith’s theme was stridently Thatcherite He was for a smaller state and lower taxes. Somehow or other this would also achieve an improvement in public services. For years there has been an obsession with the Government’s “spin” machine, but this is a supreme example of the art.