10.04.2005
The Conservative Party conference: a report
[Posted 1:34 PM by David Pryce-Jones]
Blackpool on the Lancashire coast is where English families used to spend their summer vacation in the days before cut-price fares to everywhere else. Jollity has long since vanished from its seafront and its beaches, to be replaced by a sense that whatever it stood for, all that laughter and togetherness, is coming to an end, perhaps has already come to its end. And here, in the aptly named Winter Gardens, is where the Conservative Party is holding its annual conference. The symbolism of the whole setting is almost unbearable.
Sitting in a chair to one side of proceedings is Michael Howard, still nominally the Party leader, but the lamest of lame ducks. Immediately after the recent general election, he saw fit to blame himself for defeat by a Mr. Blair victorious a third time, and so he resigned. Her Majesty�s opposition ceased to function, as there was nobody to step into Howard�s place, and the mechanism for choosing someone involved the votes of members of parliament and of Party members in a manner so cumbersome that cabals and quarrels were bound to embroil and upset all Conservatives. The Blackpool conference has the task of taking this process one step further by furnishing a short list of two candidates, whose names will go forward to be voted on by the 300,000 or so Party members. Parliament will soon resume its sittings, but this Ubuesque electoral process deprives her Majesty�s opposition of a leader until December.
The atmosphere in the Winter Gardens was not that of a birth for which expectations were happy, but rather moribund, funereal. The Party Chairman, Francis Maude, assured those present that they must �change or die,� in tones so lugubrious that he might as well have spelled out that �change and die� was really what he was brooding about. Theresa May, a former Party chairman, once offered a hostage to fortune when she categorised Conservatives as �the nasty party� – Socialist and Liberal Democrat opponents lose no opportunity to fling the phrase at any Conservative in earshot. Change was imperative, she said, men and women should respect each other as equals, with the hardly hidden implication that in the nasty party they did nothing of the kind.
A cartoon in today�s Daily Telegraph by the incomparable Matt has one road-mender saying to another, �I said it was time to move forward and fifty people backed me for the Tory leadership.� So far, five candidates for the leadership have presented themselves, and their pitch will occupy the Conference�s agenda � in fact, the contest is open, and rumors abound of a sixth possible candidate, and so ad infinitum through the 198 members of parliament who will eventually send the two front runners to the membership vote.
The one candidate to have made his address so far is Sir Malcolm Rifkind, once John Major�s Foreign Secretary, a man who speaks as though something was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Self-selected, lacking any popular support or appeal, the motive for putting himself forwards seems to be egoism as unvarnished as it is unjustified. Speaking without notes, he rejected simple stuff about change, but admitted that �we had to win back those millions of people who do not think of themselves as natural Conservatives.� How that was to be done, he did not say, wandering instead into reflections on Wilberforce and slavery and Lord Shaftesbury and the Factory Acts of 1847. He and his history lesson received a standing ovation, however.
In the wings of the Winter Garden, in the nearby Imperial Hotel where people are staying, are all manner of talks, cocktail parties, receptions, and fugitive occasions for lobbying and spinning. As in some nineteenth century melodrama, figures long gone reappear like ghosts � for instance Michael Heseltine, the man who engineered the downfall of Margaret Thatcher and is more responsible than anyone else for the death-bed scene around him. A passionate Euro-enthusiast, he is present to support Kenneth Clarke, his adjutant in the Thatcher fiasco, and who has spent the last twenty or so years advising Britain to join the euro and accept whatever the European Union wants, or face all the horsemen of the apocalypse.
Without missing a beat, certainly without any explanation of why the fearfully predicted horsemen of the apocalypse aren�t actually galloping through this reasonably prosperous and euro-free land, Clarke asks everyone to believe that this whole issue has gone into abeyance, at least for the next ten years when he likes to project himself as prime minister. Clarke is visibly obese and proverbially lazy � he boasted that in office he had not bothered to read the Maastricht Treaty which clamped the European Union into its present form � but he has nonetheless managed the fastest turn on a dime seen in recent British politics. His justification is that he prefers power to principle, and the cynicism and opportunism of it may very well sink him.
The one candidate already certain to go forward to the membership vote is David Davis, who needs only one more member of parliament to declare for him (although some who have declared might wobble and rescind). In his late fifties, fit and fighting, he stands for an independent Britain, a smaller state, lower taxes, family values – in short he is a classic Tory.
The two outsiders are Liam Fox and David Cameron. Both are younger men, Cameron is 38 and has been in parliament for only five years. Both come across engagingly, but they probably are not so well known as the others either to the party or to the country at large. Youth�s a stuff will not endure – to choose either of them would be a gamble on youth, the kind of gamble that a desperate Labour Party made when it chose Blair back in the 1990s. They might do it all the same, just by way of defiance to the old undertakers and morticians thronging the Winter Gardens.