REVIVING THE DEAD:

The Tory monster has been tamed, not transformed: Michael Howard has made an excellent start to an impossible job (Hywel Williams, December 6, 2003, The Guardian)

Having lived through a recent, and rather sordid, past, Tory MPs feel guilty. And, as new converts tend to do, they want to suppress the memory of the way they were. Few of them truly believe there will be a Conservative government in 2005 or 2006. They do not expect to win outright and, if Howard reduces the size of the Labour majority substantially, they see a danger of Labour resurrecting a "progressive" coalition with the Lib Dems designed to keep the Tories in perpetual opposition. But like a newly decolonised country which has collapsed into anarchy, the Tory parliamentary party has decided that enough is enough: trains should run on time, electricity supplies have to be reconnected and a healthy system of dictatorial control will be in charge until such time as the normal expression of internal dissent can be allowed to return.

Michael Howard suits them well enough. The quality of his Euroscepticism is that of the Tory establishment and always has been. In government he was officially sceptic, but the Eurosceptic outfit of ministerial guerrillas always thought he was Major's nark and distrusted him. Tory MPs find Howard scary in a way that Major could never hope to be and that Hague never succeeded in being, while the scariness of their late leader - as he talked of knowing what to do with revolvers if anybody tried to come and get him - had a quality of pathos. [...]

At the moment, Howard can do anything he wants with his party. The 14-year Tory leadership crisis which started with Anthony Meyer's challenge to Mrs Thatcher in November 1989 is over. It ended with the monster deciding that it would just cause too much damage to itself to run wild any more. And so it asked to be tied up. The Dracula analogy is surely very wide of the mark. This leader is Dr Frankenstein - back in charge of the beast.

Opposite him stands an equally histrionic character. The constitutional position of Tony Blair is that of beater-up of the Labour party - an electorally profitable line of business which transferred from the Tories to Blair in 1994. There's no sign yet that he is ready to abandon that role, so Howard can now do what Blair used to do - taunt him with party divisions.

However, the belief that electorates dislike divided parties is only partly true: for they reward effective leadership far more than they penalise division, as the early Thatcher years show. For the moment, Michael Howard has shut up most of his Tories - and made some of them feel better about being Tories. But the question of Tory identity remains an enigma shrouded in a mystery. Disraeli, with all his poetry, his cynicism and his ringlets, was 70 by the time true prime ministerial glory came to him. At 62, Michael Howard has more than eight years' work ahead of him to solve the question of Tory identity, for the narrative of what a modern Tory is has not yet been invented. That decade on a nihilistic spree has left its mark.

For the Tory Party to make any sense it has to stand for something you'd think would be obvious, conservatism. This means:

(1) Opposition to the EU

(2) Privatization of the Welfare State

(3) Closer alliance with the rest of the Anglosphere

(4) Law and order

(5) Traditional morality and a strengthening of societal institutions, especially religious

(6) Increasing British birthrates or/and limitations on immigration

Until they embrace such things wholeheartedly, Tony Blair will remain to their Right, making them superfluous.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 6, 2003 11:37 AM