Taliban talk
There was much huffing and puffing in Tory ranks when former leadership candidate Alan Duncan attacked his party’s ‘Taliban’ faction. ‘Censorious judgmentalism from the moralising wing of the party, which treats half our own countrymen as enemies, must be rooted out … if the Tory Taliban can’t get that, they’ll condemn us all to oblivion.’
But just as outgoing party leader Michael Howard began to protest that he simply didn’t recognise Duncan’s description of some in the party, up pops the Tories’ very own Mullah Omar to helpfully validate the frontbench spokesman’s claims.
Assuming the leadership of the newly formed Cornerstone group, Edward Leigh accused the Tory party of ‘deserting conservative Britain’. He called instead for the Tories to ape George Bush’s successful electoral strategy and adopt a platform of ‘faith, flag and family’: ‘Tory values are not dead, nor is Tory England. Both lack a voice… in the USA, these core issues excite voters. George Bush understands this and wins.’
Leigh has certainly got a feel for the jihadist language of America’s conservatives. Liberals have been winning the ‘culture wars’ in Britain for the past forty years, he claimed in The Strange Desertion of Tory Britain, the group’s opening salvo. ‘We must seize the centre ground and pull it kicking and screaming towards us. That is the only way to demolish the foundations of the liberal establishment.’
In true Taliban style, however, Cornerstone, which represents 25 socially conservative Tory MPs, reserves most of its bile for its own apostates: ‘It is unacceptable for people whose electoral success is dependent upon carrying the Conservative badge to use it to conceal fundamentally unconservative attitudes. Such critics usually have little to offer as a clarion call beyond the shrill cry for ever more unbridled liberty.’
As a recipe for electoral success, Cornerstone’s prescription is, of course, barmy. The most socially liberal attitudes in the electorate are, according to polls, to be found among professional ABC1 voters, the very group whose share of the electorate is growing. And, as the Tories have moved further to the right since 1992, the party’s lead over Labour among ABC1s has dropped from 30 per cent when John Major was re-elected to a virtual dead heat in 2005. As a contribution to the media’s traditional summer silly season, however, Cornerstone’s offering takes some beating.
Mincing their words
The root cause of the Tories’ problems remains the strong public perception that the party has barely changed since they were swept from power in 1997. A Times/Populus poll during the summer showed that only 16 per cent of voters (and less than a third of Tories themselves) believe that the Conservatives have changed for the better since 1997. A quarter of both groups believe the Tories have changed for the worse, while 54 per cent of all voters – and 47 per cent of Tories – believe it has not changed at all.
In the face of such a challenge, the Tories’ modernising wing offers up David Cameron, the shadow education secretary, as its candidate in the coming leadership election. So far, he’s said the Tories should support marriage, encourage voluntary bodies to cure the nation’s ills, and strengthen parliament. None of which exactly challenges Tory orthodoxy or suggests much in the way of intellectual imagination.
Cameron’s campaign so far has an echo in the US Democrat party’s attempts in the 1980s to wrestle with repeated rejection by the electorate. In 1984, Senator Gary Hart – a man who, like Cameron, made much of his penchant for ‘new ideas’ without ever really spelling them out – vied for the party’s presidential nomination against the guardian of traditional Democratic liberalism, former vice president Walter Mondale. Mondale eventually wised up to the vacuous nature of Hart’s challenge, adapted a popular advertising slogan of the time and shot the senator down with the killer line: ‘But where’s the beef?’ Anyone care to bet that come the autumn, David Davis won’t make mincemeat out of Cameron?
No laughing matter
As anyone who has had the misfortune to catch it will know, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is the authentic voice of George Bush’s vision of how the ‘war on terror’ should be fought: unquestioning of the administration’s policies but always ready to question the patriotism of any liberal who raises doubts about it. Strange then, that some of its journalists seemed to find something mildly amusing about the attacks on London.
Brit Hulme, the channel’s Washington managing editor, discussed the reaction of the financial markets with the line: ‘Just on a personal basis… I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, and I thought, “hmmm, time to buy”.’ Another Fox presenter, John Gibson, referring to the International Olympic committee decision the previous day to award London the Olympic games, quipped: ‘This is why I thought the Brits should let the French have the Olympics – let somebody else be worried about the guys with backpack bombs for a while.’
The BBC, we can be pretty sure, would never have reacted to a terrorist attack at home or abroad in quite such a flippant fashion. Were they to do so, however, can anyone guess which proprietor’s newspapers – never ones to give the corporation the benefit of the doubt – would have been first to attack its ‘sick’ jokes?
Definitely maybe
Largely ignored by the media due to the terrorist attacks on London – or perhaps the insignificance of the individual involved – was the resignation from the party of the Liberal Democrats’ former deputy chair, Donnachadh McCarthy.
Explaining his decision in the Independent, McCarthy attributed it to ‘Charles Kennedy’s lamentable leadership’ – which he then proceeded to chronicle. Perhaps most interesting, given the manner in which Kennedy banged on about Lib Dem opposition to the Iraq war in the final days before polling day in May, is McCarthy’s account of the leader’s somewhat equivocal stance in the run-up to the conflict.
McCarthy recalls, for example, attempts by the leader’s office to block those who wanted to organise the party’s presence at the 15 February 2003 Stop the War Coalition march, despite the Lib Dems’ national executive giving it their unanimous endorsement. So keen were Kennedy’s office to keep their options open, that they even attempted – unsuccessfully – to change the slogan of the Lib Dems’ banners from ‘Lib Dems Say No’ to ‘Give Peace a Chance’.
It seems that Tony Blair’s remark about former Tory leader William Hague – ‘he’s never seen a bandwagon he doesn’t want to jump on’ – could just as easily be applied to Charles Kennedy – except the principled Lib Dem leader really wants to make sure it’s moving at a pace before he attempts to leap on board.
With friends like these…
The former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane provided a handsome tribute to Ted Heath in the New Statesman. MacShane rightly noted the former prime minister’s bravery in taking Britain into Europe. He also commended Heath’s principled opposition to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies in the late 1930s, contrasting it unfavourably with the last Tory government’s attitude towards Slobodan Milosevic’s genocide in the former Yugoslavia.
All true, but let’s not get carried away. Heath was, to put it politely, a somewhat inconsistent friend of human rights around the globe. Most notably, he was an adviser to, and staunch defender of, the Chinese government. After it massacred hundreds of unarmed pro-democracy campaigners in Tiananmen Square, Heath commented simply: ‘There was a crisis after a month in which the civil authorities had been defied. They took action. Very well.’
But perhaps this attitude throws some light on what small talk might have passed between Heath and his successor, Margaret Thatcher, on those odd occasions when former prime ministers have to appear together for reasons of state. With her love of General Pinochet and his defence of the Chinese, maybe they swapped tales of the ageing autocrats they had befriended?