Conservative Cavalcade - 2

When it became inevitable that Eden had to go, his successor emerged via the arcane ‘magic circle’ consultation processes of the Conservative party which were glaringly undemocratic. The story goes that Lord Salisbury – one of the party’s most senior [and hereditary] grandees - interviewed his cabinet colleagues and other party dignitaries, simply asking the cryptic question: “Well, is it Wab or Hawold?” [His lordship had a pronounced lisp.] “Wab” was R.A. Butler, one of the party’s more subtle-minded politicians with a reputation for equivocation, and perhaps for that reason never destined to get the top prize. “Hawold” was Harold Macmillan, another of Churchill’s senior lieutenants, who proved to be the successful contender. As he had been a ‘hawk’ during the early stages of the Suez crisis, but switched sides as soon as it became obvious that the adventure was turning into a catastrophe, his triumph struck some observers as none too well deserved. There had always been rivalry between the two. There is a nice story – probably apocryphal - that after one of his cabinet reshuffles, Macmillan glanced around the table and said “Well, there are some new faces in the cabinet, and several old ones - including both of Mr Butler’s!”

This archaic method of choosing a leader was acknowledged, even by traditionalists, to be unsatisfactory, so after the ‘emergence’ of Macmillan’s successor, the Earl of Home [later Sir Alec Douglas-Home], a method of election was devised, chiefly by my Cambridge contemporary and friend Humphry Berkeley, then a Conservative MP but destined soon to join the Labour Party. This, in modified form, has been used ever since.

Harold Macmillan gave a [not entirely accurate] impression of being unflappable, and his steadying hand on the tiller served the country pretty well for some years, earning him the soubriquet of ‘Supermac’. Like Churchill, he had a taste for flamboyant gestures and fancy hats, one of which startled even the buttoned-up Russians when he visited Moscow. Under Macmillan the economy prospered for some years, enabling him to inform the nation that “most of our people have never had it so good”. He repaired the Anglo-American relationship which had been ruptured by Suez, forming a friendly relationship with President John F. Kennedy. He comfortably won a general election in 1959, but his second term proved less happy.

In 1960 he famously told the South African parliament that a wind of change was blowing through the African continent and, whether we liked it or not, this growth of national consciousness had to be accepted as a political fact - an audacious statement which went down like a lead balloon with the South African apartheid government! At home, his government became less popular, and in 1962 he impetuously sacked six cabinet ministers in the ‘night of the long knives’ . This was widely interpreted as signalling loss of nerve, and his hitherto serene command of events slipped from his grasp. A year later he resigned in the wake of the sordid ‘Profumo affair’, whose titillating revelations of widespread [mostly mythical] sexual orgies in high places, involving senior politicians and even [so it was said] judges, appeared to bemuse him as he remarked plaintively that he had no knowledge of such things and ‘did not move among young people’.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who renounced his peerage to sit in the Commons as prime minister. had been a capable foreign secretary, but proved a lacklustre premier and only survived in office for just under a year. He should not, however, be under-rated and had a nice line in self-deprecatory humour. He once said "There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible" [he confessed to using matchsticks when contemplating the latter]. His party’s narrow defeat in the 1964 general election ushered in the shallow modernity of Harold Wilson, who promised a revolutionary ‘white heat’ [which never materialised] to sweep away restrictive practices and outdated methods on both sides of industry. The ‘Swinging Sixties’ which – against his own personal preferences – enlivened Wilson’s premiership also featured the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and the mis-named ‘permissive society’.

Edward Heath, who succeeded Douglas-Home as the first elected Conservative party leader in 1965 and was prime minister from 1970 to 1974 was, unlike the bulk of his party, a convinced enthusiast for the European Union, and successfully negotiated Britain’s membership in 1973 – a high point of his premiership. In Opposition he proposed an agenda of trade union reform, tax cuts and spending restraints; but adverse economic circumstances forced him as prime minister to adopt price and incomes policies to combat inflation. His government also had to deploy troops in Northern Ireland to combat the IRA’s military campaign, and widespread industrial unrest in the face of pay restraint policies led for a time to power cuts and the imposition of a three-day working week. Nevertheless, the Conservatives gained more votes nationally than Labour in the 1974 general election, though they retained fewer parliamentary seats.

In 1975 Heath was defeated in a leadership election by Margaret Thatcher – an event which he took as a personal snub, and thereafter poured scorn upon “that bloody woman”. This sullenness did his party little good in the eyes of the public, as in similar fashion Gordon Brown’s prolonged sulk at his predecessor’s over-long tenure of No. 10 Downing Street did New Labour no favours.

Mrs Thatcher triumphantly won the 1979 general election, becoming the United Kingdom’s first woman prime minister and eventually, after winning two further terms, the longest serving one for 150 years. Although when entering No. 10 for the first time as prime minster she invoked St. Francis’s plea for peace in place of strife, and pledged to bring hope in place of despair, she quickly morphed into the most controversial and, for some, the most hated premier of the 20^th century. This was because she rightly perceived that the country could not continue to drift as it had been doing and required shaking up, which she proceeded to do with characteristic determination – or, as some preferred to put it, sheer pig-headed obstinacy. It was unfortunate both for her and for the country that some of her preferred nostrums proved mistaken and engendered much unnecessary hostility – especially the briefly imposed poll tax, which led to mass riots and police violence in Trafalgar Square.

In her first two years of office unemployment fell and the prime minister gained great popularity by her determined and victorious response to Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. As a result, her party was re-elected by a landslide in 1983. Her second government followed a radical programme of privatisation and deregulation, reform of the Trade Unions, tax cuts, and the introduction of market mechanisms into health and education. Her quite worthy aim was to reduce the role of government and to increase individual self-reliance, but this was only partly achieved and with damaging social cost including a bitter and at times violent miners’ strike.

Mrs Thatcher also became a leading player on the international stage, being on cronyish terms with US President Ronald Reagan and gaining the approbation of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev whose countrymen admiringly dubbed her the ‘Iron Lady’. Unlike her predecessor Heath, however, she was not favourably inclined towards the European Union, and engaged in hard bargaining for what she saw as threatened British interests. The Conservative party as a whole remained split over Europe, the majority only reluctantly supporting UK membership of the EU and a vociferous minority clamouring for withdrawal. It was Europe, in the end, which caused the Iron Lady’s downfall after a witheringly critical speech in the Commons by her former foreign secretary and chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe. She called a leadership election, but although she won the first ballot it became clear that there was not enough support from her cabinet colleagues for her to continue and she resigned in uncharacteristically tearful mood.

Her successor, John Major, was prime minister from 1990 until 1997 - a difficult few years for both himself and his party. The internal revolt of the anti-European group whom Major in an unguarded moment called ‘the bastards’ rumbled on until the whip was withdrawn from several of them. The prime minister’s efforts to give the impression that he was firmly in charge were sabotaged when his ‘back to basics’ slogan – lip-read as code for a stricter morality in politics – was undermined when several Conservative MPs’ involvements in sexual scandals and, more seriously, in financial corruption charges [‘cash for questions’] mired the Major government in an atmosphere of sleaze. The government was obviously exhausted, and when the Conservatives lost the 1997 general election, the ex-prime minister made no bones about his relief at being free to slip thankfully away to watch cricket at Lords.

Since 1997 the Conservatives have tried out almost as many new leaders as a fussy woman buying hats. After a so-far-so-good start, the latest one, David Cameron, is not yet home and dry. Although a better debater than the increasingly unpopular New Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, he has a formidable task ahead of him if he is to establish an enduring lead in public opinion and consolidate in his party’s favour the growing feeling that after eleven years of Blair-Brownism it’s time for a sea-change in the country’s political direction.

Conservative Cavalcade - 1

The Conservative party has played such a major part in public affairs during my lifetime that I need more than one post to have my say about them.

When I was little, there was a National Government, and its prime minister was Ramsay MacDonald. I didn’t understand, then, that this ‘national’ government was really an overwhelmingly Conservative one – or, indeed, that there was such a thing as His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Insofar as I became aware of political things, I just took ‘the government’ for granted.

I suppose the first incident that aroused my still childish interest was the abdication of King Edward VIII which, indeed, riveted the entire country. Royalty was still widely revered in those days, and the notion that our King should want to marry a common American woman, and a divorced one at that, shocked Britain to the core. By then, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister, widely regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’, and temperamentally a social healer who was sometimes over-complacent. His skilful navigation of the switchover from the erring Edward to the model family monarch George VI won the plaudits of almost everyone except Winston Churchill and a handful of romantic ‘King’s men’.

The next big political event to invade my budding consciousness of the wider world beyond our family life was the Munich crisis. Baldwin’s successor, Neville Chamberlain, a prim, narrow-minded but basically decent man, dramatically flew for the first time in his life, not once but twice, to Germany in the space of a few days plead with Hitler to avert a European war. The dictator didn’t think much of this Victorian throwback, and is supposed to have said "If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers". Nonetheless, Chamberlain emerged from the lion’s den with what he optimistically announced was Hitler’s pledge of “peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time." But he must surely have known, as well as nearly everyone else did, that this was a hollow hope.

Nowadays, ‘appeasement’ has a bad name and Baldwin and Chamberlain are both execrated for their foolish complacency. But there was much support for their policies at the time; the senseless bloodbath of the 1914-18 trench warfare was only a few years behind, with its tragic loss of almost a whole generation of youth, and most British people were appalled at the thought of another war. Fortunately, though, Winston Churchill was sounding the alarm throughout the 1930s. But he and his small band of supporters were in a minority although I am glad to say my family believed - however reluctantly - that he was right.

Apart from renegade kings and upstart dictators, the National Government of the pre-war decade was a far better one in many respects than it has since been given credit for. When it came into office, the country was almost bankrupt and in the grip of a severe economic depression. This was partly the result of post-war exhaustion, and more immediately a consequence of the great 1929 Wall street crash which resulted from reckless speculation on the American stock market. While accelerating, though still inadequate, rearmament in the last years of peace helped, the National government had been laying the groundwork for economic recovery even earlier, with the abandonment of free trade and the introduction of tariff protection for Britain’s basic industries which, without this, would have been even worse equipped to fight the 1939-45 war. Unemployment was also a nagging problem about which more should and could have been done. But in retrospect, and for all their sins of omission, the ‘men of Munich’ have had an excessive amount of blame heaped upon them by political opponents and historians. Popularity plummets all too swiftly, and Baldwin – who had been hailed as a national saviour after the abdication – became even more unpopular than Chamberlain when the war erupted in earnest in the summer of 1940. He was reviled for not having warned the nation of its peril, and many rejoiced in mean fashion when his beautiful wrought iron ornamental gates at Bewdley [he was an ironmaster] were seized for scrap. His old age was lonely, and I felt pity for him when, as an undergraduate, I saw him glumly hobbling around the Senate House courtyard in procession as Chancellor of Cambridge University.

My own political consciousness only blossomed [if that is the right word!] during the war, when I was a schoolboy with a fascination for history and a keen awareness of the increasingly bitter global struggle. Winston Churchill’s government was a coalition of the three main political parties, and more genuinely ‘national’ than its predecessor had been, though the majority of MPs were still Conservative. During his long political career Churchill himself had been by turns a Conservative, a Liberal, and then a Conservative again. Because of his presumed ‘disloyalty’ during the 1930s, he was disliked and mistrusted by many Conservatives, both in and outside parliament, and only became prime minister on the insistence of the Labour Party, who refused to serve under his rival Lord Halifax.

Churchill’s heroic stance as the implacable British bulldog snarling at the Nazi foe and as the prime architect of Allied victory won the bulk of his party over so that many regarded him as their main asset. When he was unexpectedly defeated in the 1945 landslide general election which swept Labour not only into office but, for the first time, into power he was solidly supported by most Conservatives in his new and unfamiliar role as leader of the opposition. [Indeed, the stalwartly Tory mother of a college friend of mine refused to recognise this unpalatable turn of affairs, and made a point of always referring to Mr Churchill as “the prime minister” throughout the six years that he wasn’t!] During my university days and for some time afterwards I was a pretty strong Churchillian Conservative, because I believed that the Tories, more than Labour, stood for the freedom of the individual to live their personal lives as they chose – something I was perhaps wrong about.

I remained a Conservative until the Suez crisis of 1956, when it became painfully apparent that Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, had not only secretly colluded with France and Israel in attacking Egypt and attempting to seize the Suez Canal, but also had told a whole pack of lies to parliament and the country about the fiasco. At which point I ceased to be a Conservative [writing a pompous letter of resignation to my local MP], and have ever since had no particularly strong party allegiance, though inclining towards the Liberals [now LibDems] primarily because of their stance on civil liberty issues and voting reform.