Apologies in advance for presenting a post which, at first glance, appears to be related to British politics. It certainly reflects my own fears and concerns as a lifelong Conservative Party voter (and sometime activist) here in the UK. But on the eve of Governor Palin’s address to the Tea Party Convention, a moment that may well turn out to be transformational for American politics, Fraser Nelson’s cri de coeur about the future path of a Tory government must resonate with those conservatives in America who, in the dark fastness of night, still have feelings of unease about the upper echelons of the GOP.
We have an election coming up next May and the runes look good for a Tory victory. Triumph, however, is never assured until after the event and voters in all democracies sometimes have a nasty habit of giving the pundits and pollsters a bloody nose (a salutary warning to all my American friends wallowing in the euphoria of the Scott Brown victory)
Nelson, however, frames his concerns within the context of a Conservative victory which places David Cameron and his team in control of the levers of power in Westminster. Previous Tory leaders have stepped into Downing Street over the bloodied corpse of a broken Labour regime, most recently in 1970 and 1979, but with differing outcomes.
To win power is very different from winning office. To win the keys to No 10, a prime minister needs to be skilled in electoral combat. But to take power, a prime minister needs an agenda. Without one, he is a slave to his predecessors.
The last two times that the Tories took power from Labour ended very differently. Ted Heath, in 1970, was forced into a U-turn and lost power after four years. Margaret Thatcher transformed the country. Which is David Cameron likely to follow?
The problem is that, since the middle of the previous century, conservatives have allowed the left, aided and abetted by their surrogates in the media, to dictate the parameters of political debate. Certain concepts have been embroidered into the fabric of cultural discourse with such skill and discretion that many people on the right have subconsciously shifted their own positions of what is and what is not acceptable – for if they do not they risk being branded as neanderthal by the great and the good
Part of it is pure political reflex. Westminster is notoriously slow to work out which ideas have been abandoned by the public as not fit for purpose. We must also remember that the party is still shellshocked by three election defeats and its own internal warfare. The temptation is to get rid of anything that anyone might criticise. There is talk of keeping to a “mainstream” — one that seems to run through Fleet Street and Westminster.
Hands up those who thought “David Frum” when reading that quote. Believe me there are plenty of Frums on the right in London, ceaselessly pontificating about the need to adapt political positions to accommodate the sensitive antennae of shape shifters, or moderates, as they are more often described in polite society. “Capturing the middle ground” is usually their recipe for political success, ignoring the fact that the most electorally successful Conservative leader in modern British political history was a woman who made very little attempt to capture the middle ground. Furthermore she was eventually felled, not by the electorate, but by a conspiracy of Frum-like dwarves driven by motives of petty revenge and the desire for applause from the galleries of the BBC and the assembled ranks of the punditocracy who had had never recovered from the shock of having their advice ignored by someone as common as a grocer’s daughter.
Thatcher’s guru during the 70s and 80s was Keith Joseph, originally, like Thatcher, a minister in the Edward Heath government which took power after the defeat of the incumbent Labour government led by Harold Wilson in 1970. Heath won power on the strength of a strong fiscally conservative smaller government manifesto but within a year had made a complete U turn. In 1974 Harold Wilson returned to power.
Nelson points out that both Joseph and Thatcher realised that the Tory failure had sprung from an inability to shed the restrictive carapace of conforming to the liberal left agenda.
Keith Joseph declared that he had been “converted” to Conservatism in April 1974 — two months after that defeat. He said that he suddenly realised that, for all the bold talk about taking over from Harold Wilson, it was the same Government doing the same things.
Truly to take power, he said, one had to set the terms of debate. He had a phrase for it: the “verbal snares” that Labour sets for Conservatives. If a Tory party takes power yet uses Labour’s language, judges success by Labour’s yardsticks and confines itself to Labour’s ambitions, that’s not change. It’s more of the same.
What Thatcher did was not only to alter the parameters of debate – she also took the battle directly to the Labour party and their media cheerleaders in the BBC and the chattering classes. She was aggressive in her political stance, never apologising, always pressing the left onto the back foot by calling them to account whenever they, and the Frums in her own party, waffled on about the need to be “caring” and cautious.
For eleven years, with just a handful of loyalists in her party but to the delight of millions of ordinary people in our country she totally ignored the great and the good who felt they had the natural right to tell us what to do as they chattered self righteously at their North London dinner parties. But, lacking a well organised network of support within her own party she was unable to ensure an effective succession and, with her political demise, the old guard of trimmers and calculators were able to quench the revolutionary fire and return to the mantra of living corpses everywhere, “steady as she goes”….
Nelson isn’t yet convinced that David Cameron will sell out. But the siren voices are there, whispering in his ear…
But against Mr Cameron’s good angel, making the case for radicalism in his ear, is a bad angel urging caution. This angel will say that any meaningful policy offers a hostage to fortune. It will try to persuade him of the greatest political deception: we should be cautious now, and do what we want to do later.
This is the mission statement of every failed prime minister: because when does this moment for radicalism come? At what point will the Tory party not be in election mode? When Margaret Thatcher’s ministers presented her with a five-year plan, she would point out that Britain won a world war in less time. But the bad angel will tell Mr Cameron that winning, actually, is enough this time: the radical reforms can be left for the second term. Ted Heath thought the same. Mr Cameron will either be a radical or a failure. There is no middle way.
When Sarah Palin mounts the platform in Nashville she will, of course, be herself. She invokes comparison with Reagan and Thatcher but it is unwise to clothe contemporary figures in the raiment of the past – different times, different situations. But she will talk the Thatcher message of trusting people to make their own decisions rather than having decisions made for them and she will fearlessly take the fight to the left and the Frums and the trimmers. But with the Tea Partiers she will have something that Thatcher never had, a potential army of grassroots soldiers ready and willing to send a surge of electricity through the GOP machine giving it a will to power, not to gain office and enjoy the trappings but to transform the political and cultural fabric of the nation.
Her own role in that process remains shrouded in the swirling mists of the unknown future. She might be the leader ready to march in front to capture the citadel and accept the sash of authority from the grateful legions or just the prophet providing the impetus to surge the movement forward, enabling new leaders to emerge on the march. But one thing is certain – it is difficult to imagine any other public figure more suited to that moment than Sarah Palin.
Camille Paglia said of her in the autumn of 2008 when the entirety of the left and many on the right were treating her with disdain that Palin was a gifted politician whose time had not yet come.
Perhaps February 2010 is her time….
