The ‘vultures are circling’ over Iain Duncan Smith. John Bercow’s heralding of the New Year with this message provided the starkest evidence yet that much of the Tory parliamentary party has already decided that their leader is a busted flush. Iain Duncan’s Smith’s ‘unite or die’ message has served only to highlight his weakness.
Like William Hague before him, it is a weakness that lays bare the Tories’ divisions and spurs on the ritual bloodletting to which they have become addicted. David Davis and Eric Forth are plotting their attack from the party’s authoritarian wing. The ‘mods’ and ‘one nation’ Tories are tentatively flirting with each other in pursuit of an uneasy alliance with Ken Clarke at its head.
This last option poses the biggest danger for Labour. For all their lurches to the right, the Tories’ slide into electoral disaster has been accelerated primarily because they have chosen leaders of the second and third rank. A Davis succession would simply perpetuate a recurring nightmare for thinking Conservatives, where wider electoral appeal is continually subjugated by a yearning for rightwing ideological purity. In contrast, a final, if grudging, acceptance of Clarke would shift the electoral landscape and present the Prime Minister with his first credible opponent across the dispatch box.
For many years, Ken Clarke has been presented as the ‘one nation’ big beast of the jungle – the last of the lineage of Disraeli, Butler, Macmillan and MacLeod. It is an image fed by the ever-present contrast with the political pygmies who have beaten Clarke to the Tory crown and by the juxtaposition of his ‘one nation’ instincts with the Conservative descent into extremism. He has a strong hold on the political commentariat and has built a reputation as a moderate-minded, people’s favourite Conservative.
The combination of the precariousness of Duncan Smith’s grip on the leadership and Clarke’s electoral appeal poses a real threat to Labour, one that it cannot afford to be complacent about. The task of puncturing the Clarke myth should be an urgent one for the party – the Tories’ death wish cannot be relied upon forever. Clarke as Tory leader would signal an immediate change in the Tories’ media image and electoral prospects. It would be too late to begin drawing the dividing lines in such a climate – much of the battleground would have already been ceded.
The Clarke myth is built on three edifices: his economic record, his approach to public services, and his apparent, instinctual ‘one nation’ concern for social justice. Clarke boasts that he is ‘the most successful chancellor since the war’. This is revisionism that does not stand up to scrutiny. At the end of his tenure as chancellor, debt stood at 44 percent of GDP and there was chronic underfunding in our public services. Clarke’s overruling of the Bank of England on interest rates in favour of the Tories’ short-term electoral imperatives left inflation creeping back into the system. During his chancellorship, he imposed the tightest curbs on public spending since the war.
Clarke’s punditry since leaving office confirms his lack of economic judgement. He was fiercely hostile to granting operational independence to the Bank of England when Labour came to office, dismissing it as ‘a serious mistake’ and a ‘gimmick’. He predicted that the decision would lead to a severe recession in 1998. Cassandra-like soothsaying has been the order of the day ever since. Clarke meets each budget and spending review with a warning of impending economic doom.
Clarke’s attitude to Labour’s extra investment betrays the hollowness of his commitment to public services. He has opposed every new announcement of spending on schools and hospitals with familiar verbosity. A grim warning from Clarke that Labour’s extra investment is ‘unsustainable’ and ‘reckless’ is now a fixture of every budgetary debate.
In the last Tory leadership election, he proposed a public spending envelope identical to that outlined by Hague and Michael Portillo in 2001. His record on investment in his time as chancellor shows the approach to be a consistent one. In his last three budgets, he cut education spending by £80 per pupil. Health spending in England was actually falling in real terms when he left office.
In the cultivation of his own myth as friend to the public services, much is made by Clarke of his time as custodian of the Home Office and the departments of health and education. But the record belies the image. As home secretary, his police reforms were directly responsible for the massive fall in police numbers in the mid 1990s.
As health secretary, he was the man who imposed charges for eye tests, and who, despite the Tories’ chronic under-investment in the NHS, said he ‘does not accept that the NHS is under-funded’. At the education department, he reversed the Tories’ commitment to nursery education for three and four year-olds and presided over falling standards and rising class sizes of more than 40.
Ken Clarke’s professed commitment to social justice as part of the wider ‘one nation’ Toryism that he has come to embody gives him his strongest centre-ground credentials. But, in truth, ‘one nation’ Toryism has always been a morally bankrupt philosophy – a sugaring of the defence of privilege through a limited patricianism.
Clarke’s record of opposition to progressive reform makes the point. As chancellor, it was he who imposed VAT on fuel at eight percent and attempted to increase it to 17.5 percent. In Clarke’s view, this attack on pensioners should have been broadened by extending VAT to children’s clothes, food, transport and newspapers.
This addiction to the most regressive of taxes is hard to square with a concern for social justice. Nor can it be the mark of a commitment to social amelioration to attack so strongly the introduction of the minimum wage, the Working Families’ Tax Credit, the pensioners’ winter fuel payment, the New Deal and the social chapter, but to vote in favour of the poll tax.
The propagation of the Clarke legend has depended on him distancing himself from the Tories’ Thatcherite past. Clarke has found it all too easy to perpetuate this image amidst his party’s capture by the ideologues of the hard right. But Ken Clarke cannot be allowed to escape his record. He was the only Tory to have held ministerial office throughout the eighteen years of Tory government. He was in the commanding ranks of the guilty men who left behind them public services starved of investment, Britain’s two worst postwar recessions, a wilful neglect of any meaningful conception of social justice, and a party split from top to bottom. In short, he represents why the Tories were kicked out in 1997. No one should be fooled by the Clarke myth.