There was an echo. It has happened before. When ministers first heard that the Tories had chosen Iain Duncan Smith there were broad smiles, jokes about opening the champagne and a cheery feeling that their luck was holding. The Conservatives had gone for the extremist, unelectable option. But I was in the Commons, years back, as a young student on a visit when the news came through of another leadership election. I watched as Labour MPs whooped with delight when they heard that the stupid Tories had chosen… the obscure, rightwing and clearly unelectable Margaret Hilda Thatcher. So the first message to New Labour is simple: beware!
I share the general feeling that Kenneth Clarke would have been the more dangerous choice as Tory leader from a Labour perspective. He would have harried Tony Blair and the cabinet far more effectively on public service delivery. He would have looked immediately like an alternative Prime Minister. Labour would have been back in a street-by-street, hand-to-hand fight for the centre ground.
It was not to be. Instead a different political fight will develop. And Labour would be very foolish to assume that they cannot lose this fight. You can never, never take the electorate for granted. If, in a few years’ time, our schools and hospitals are not clearly better; if – and MPs are only human – there have been a few more sleaze scandals; and if, frankly, the public has grown bored of Tony Blair, then ‘IDS’ is in with a real chance. He comes across as decent, straight, moderate in his language. And if he is a little old-fashioned and not a great actor or orator – well, people may be ready for that.
But IDS also brings an ideological challenge to New Labour. In some areas he takes current government thinking and pushes it further. Mr Blair wants more private involvement in state education and the Health Service. Where it ‘makes sense’ to bring in private managers and develop longer-term contracts for the provision of public services, he will do it.
The Duncan Smith Tories only seem to differ in their tone; they celebrate the idea of more healthcare being provided through private hospitals, and more schools being run by private trusts. They are eager to ask whether ‘public services’ need mean ‘state services’; whether the taxpayer could not instead simply subsidise the lower-income use of essentially private provision. That might seem hopelessly unpopular now. But what will the mood be if Labour has failed and people’s patience is running out?
Or look at the developing citizenship agenda being rolled out by David Blunkett and other ministers. New Labour wants more civic involvement, a people who give their free time more readily, leading to a society less dependent on old-style state paternalism. But there comes a point when this starts to sound like Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘welfare society not a welfare state’ slogan. It is not surprising: both parties have been drawing ideas from the communitarian and Republican thinkers of America.
Ah but, you may say, what about Europe? After all, this is a fully fledged Europhobic takeover of the party and even if the British voters dislike the idea of the Euro, they are scared stiff of being frogmarched out of the EU itself, something which some of IDS’s supporters at least, would not be unhappy about.
Well, again, my message is: beware! The notion that what we need is a stronger dose of American-style labour flexibility and vigour in the EU has already been popularised by Gordon Brown. I think the Duncan Smith victory will incline Tony Blair to go for a referendum on the single currency quite early, as his cancelled TUC speech hinted he might. But whether we go into the Euro or not, the Duncan Smith pre-election message on Europe will not be withdrawal, it will be a tougher, more aggressive version of what we have now: pushing for reform of EU institutions. So, as with public services, the notion that the Tories are bound to sound ‘unelectable’ on Europe has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Of course, another scenario is possible. It may not work out for IDS. Despite his best efforts, he may have no more success in shifting the polls than William Hague did. This time, the Tories will be brutal. Duncan Smith will not be allowed to bravely lead his troops to certain defeat. There’s an outside chance that, come the next election, Labour will be facing not the decent, patrician Iain Duncan Smith, but a bright, new, charismatic Tory leader, Michael Portillo. This country has voted for the right-wing alternative time and time again. Labour complacency and Labour failure could, as in the Seventies, deliver Britain back to the right. Anyone who laughs the idea off is helping it to happen.