Small earthquake in Westminster - United Kingdom politics - Column

National Review, July 31, 1995 by Robin Harris

ON ELECTION day for the leadership of the Conservative Party (Tuesday, July 4) the Sun newspaper asked: ``How do you tell if a Tory MP is lying?'' It answered, ``See if his lips move.'' The lips were moving again after the result was announced -- 218 votes for Prime Minister John Major; 89 votes for the challenger, John Redwood, and 22 abstentions or spoiled ballot papers. Mr. Major called it a ``very clear-cut decision'' in his favor and said that ``the time for division'' was over. Cabinet ministers jostled to find a television camera so as to declare their ecstasy at the result and make stern calls for unity. Backbenchers assured anyone who would listen that they had been Major loyalists all along.

But as the political dust settles it is clear that the landscape of Westminster has changed in a number of significant ways. The prime minister's position is almost certainly secure until the next election. He won the support of two-thirds of the electors -- which also means that in a vote of confidence which he himself initiated, he failed to win over the other third. Either way, in this limited sense his gamble has paid off. Part of the price he paid, however, was exposing the internal arguments of the Conservative Party. That in itself was a good deal less damaging than the political managers feared. But more important, the prime minister has had to move from uneasily straddling the party's muddled middle to a position on its left in order to secure the votes of Michael Heseltine's supporters. Mr. Heseltine, probably for health reasons, chose not to destabilize Mr. Major and grasp the crown himself; but in a three-hour session at Downing Street on the day of the vote he seems to have hammered out an agreement to bring his supporters in behind the prime minister in exchange for the deputy prime ministership and much-enhanced cabinet authority. This almost certainly secures the future of Kenneth Clarke, the Right's main bugbear, in the crucial position of chancellor of the exchequer. As a result, Mr. Major could not (even if he wished) now harden his policy against the pound sterling's membership in a European single currency or put through the big spending and tax cuts that would please disillusioned Tory supporters.

John Major has thus finally transformed himself from a right-winger who, in the circumstances of 1990, had the advantage of not being Margaret Thatcher, to a left-winger who, in the circumstances of 1995, has the advantage of not being Michael Heseltine. As has been increasingly clear over the last two years, he will feel more at ease in his second guise than his first. For Mr. Major's instincts lie on the left. The secrets of a British politician's soul are most likely to be blurted out in the House of Commons. So it was with Margaret Thatcher's troika of ``nos'' to European federalism on the eve of her overthrow; so it is with a solitary ``yes'' by Mr. Major:

Mr. Blair [Opposition Leader]: Does the Prime Minister accept it as a responsibility of Government to reduce inequality? The Prime Minister: Yes. [Hansard, February 9, 1995.]

Gone is the refusal to engage in social engineering, the denial that there is a ``right'' distribution of incomes, the rejection of the notion that the state or society is to blame if one man succeeds while another fails. If a Conservative can get that wrong, he can get anything wrong -- as Mr. Major usually does. And that is why Mr. Blair, whose Labour Party is strong on presentation but weak on substance, makes little secret of his delight that it is Mr. Major who will now face him at the next general election. For Mr. Blair does not wish to debate the issues; and Mr. Major has no intention of trying.

Which brings the shrewder commentators to the second implication of the leadership election. It is likely that the Conservative Party will enjoy some immediate recovery in the opinion polls as a result of the 12-day TV spectacular. But there is no reason to believe it will last and every reason to be confident that the Conservative Party is now irrevocably on course for its most severe defeat in modern times. Ever since the government's credibility was shattered when sterling was forced out of the European exchange-rate mechanism in September 1992 nothing has gone right. Taxes were raised to curb the deficit created by overspending. On Europe, the prime minister shifted his line with every passing vote, sought to accommodate each competing faction, and finally gave up altogether: on this fundamental constitutional question he insisted his government was agnostic. A series of sleazy scandals, each mishandled by Mr. Major, undermined the Conservative Party's reputation; and the resort to special committees chaired by judges to investigate arms sales to Iraq and political corruption, far from curbing criticism, relentlessly prolonged it.

The prime minister remains unable to reap the credit for economic success, which is perceived to have occurred in spite, not because, of his policies; he is unable to unify his party or even his cabinet because he does not have the authority, passion, or intellect to engage either wing in argument; and he is unable to frighten the electorate by portraying Mr. Blair as a greater risk than his accident-prone self. To compound these problems, Mr. Major has managed to lose the support of four out of five pro-Tory national daily newspapers -- against whose owners and editors he and his advisors daily engage in semi-public vituperation. So Mr. Major will now survive to fight and lose the next election, doing so from a position on the left of the Tory Party's spectrum.