The round of party conferences is over, leaving the Prime Minister holding the field both in the country and in his party. Doubts hang over his two main rivals. But there could well be trouble for Tony Blair to come, a Guardian columnist says.
THIS autumn was supposed to be a difficult one for Britain?s political parties. Each approached its annual conference with more than the usual trepidation. This had little to do with the factor that deserved to provoke it: the slump in political interest, in any party and all of them, which is calamitously registered by the new low turnout at elections. Conference season is not the moment when professional politicians and their activists are likely to ask profound questions about their role in the functioning of democracy; their apprehensions at this time are more secular. The two main parties especially were worried in 2002 about how their leaders would come out. Actually, all three leaders did better than expected ? but with results that do not in every case augur well.
For the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the direst prophecies were made. The rank-and-file party membership was flexing for resistance, it was said, after eight years of bowing to his presidential leadership. Numerous trade union leaders were getting ready to oppose his plans for private financing of public services. There would be a real stirring down below, as the conference asserted its traditional role of critic and Lefty troublemaker. On top of that was the prospect of an Iraq war, featuring poodle Blair dancing to the whip of ringmaster George W. Bush. Since there can be no doubt that this prospect alarms more Labour people, indeed more British voters, than any foreign adventure by a British leader since Suez, this was indeed going to be a conference that Tony Blair would for once find it impossible to spin into submission.
The analysis underestimated Blair and showed some amnesia about how politics works. Throughout those eight years, the Labour party conference has operated in an unreal world. Each time, the leader arranged for and was granted an effortless free ride. Before he won office and throughout the first term, Labour showed the discipline of a party starved of power to the point of near-death. From union baron to discontented delegate, all present conspired to fatten up the emaciated Labour body politic. After his first victory, getting rid of Clause Four, Mr Blair never had a fight on his hands inside his party.
Yet, like all top politicians, fights are what he needs, and for him in particular they are a stimulus that brings out his best. This year?s fights turned out to be less threatening than everyone expected, but were enough to prompt the most serious and coherent conference speech of the nine Blair has delivered. He is a leader at the top of his game. On public service financing he hammered his critics into the ground by the force of rhetoric and circumstance ? PFI, as it is termed, is so deeply rooted into government financial plans as to be inextricable even by the half-dozen biggest union leaders who have now decided that they thoroughly dislike it. The whiff of opposition enabled the leader to make them seem like pygmies, even though they contrived to win the vote.
On Iraq, Blair has trouble to come. His fate is in the hands of another national leader, a shocking situation for any prime minister to face. If Bush decides to circumvent the United Nations and declare Iraq a suitable target for unilateral attack in the name of American national interest, it is hard to imagine Britain or Blair finding the nerve to dissent or withdraw military support. Could 60 years of history, that special history of unfailing Anglo-American intimacy, be so brutally undone? I doubt it. Then, it is not hard to plot a critical path towards a major bust-up in the Labour Party, where even moderate non-Lefties balk at this war. Until that moment, however, Blair emerges from the autumn travails a larger, less troubled leader than he was when he went in.
So, I suppose, does Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat. The instant outcome of the conference season for him was an opinion poll declaring that voters found him a more credible prime minister than Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative leader. The Lib Dem camp exulted at a piece of evidence that seemed to add to the solid standing of the party as a whole. It distracted from the conference?s failure to make good the extravagant summer claim that the party was about to displace the Tories as the serious party of opposition to Labour. This piece of grandstanding may make good presentational sense, but bears little scrutiny alongside the relative numbers of the two parties or, especially, the incoherence of the Lib Dem claim to be filling a gap on the oppositional Right while espousing policies to the left of Tony Blair.
This, in turn, summons up a growing doubt about Mr Kennedy. He has risen to eminence almost without trace. The voters apparently now accord him the standing of a serious player, yet he has said little serious to justify such an estimate. Is he to triumph as the ultimate anti-politician, the beneficiary of that dangerous boredom with politics that most politicians prefer not to address? The more the standing of the Lib Dems seems to strengthen, the more stringent the questions that will need to be directed at its leader. I do not think he answered any of them this autumn.
The same, paradoxically, cannot be said of Iain Duncan Smith. We now know more about him, and the presentation of himself he proposes to make to the electorate: the ?quiet man?, the steady fellow with soldierly virtues, the leader determined to cut away from a Tory governmental past, even, it seems, the iconic Thatcherite past, in which he played no ministerial part. Even more obviously than Blair, IDS went into his autumn manoeuvres under the weight of negative expectations. The Tory media were as relentless as the BBC. The party had no direction and no hope, and a leader who showed no sign of being able to give it either.
From this low base, IDS could barely fail to rise and earn a modicum of acclaim. Merely by not falling off the platform, he would show he had more to him than some people thought. Along with his zippy new chairman, Theresa May, he did a bit better than that. From apparently possessing no policies, he produced the neat round number of 25, most of them directed to what all parties agree to be the constellation that dominates Britain?s political sky: public service provision in all varieties of dark and light. Different levels of thought have been applied to the Tory solutions for schools, hospitals, transport, crime and the rest of the unglamorous issues that will be the alpha and omega of British politics until Iraq is invaded and/or the Government embraces the euro. But these lines appeared to be a start towards producing a reformed Conservatism more relevant than that of either Margaret Thatcher or John Major to the issues people care about.
They leave two problems hanging in the air, however. One is how to fire up the core Tory supporters who believe there must be such a thing as a truly conservative party. IDS, coming from the Right but fighting from the centre, has yet to make sense of that conundrum. He has even tried to dilute Europe into irrelevance as an issue. Yet the Right, at present, owns Conservatism?s shrunken heart and soul. How will he keep them?
Secondly, an intriguing possibility beckons. IDS is setting an agenda for a centrist party. Yet he himself looks incapable of delivering it an election victory. He proclaims himself the quiet man against Blair?s presidentialism. Yet that probably misreads a politics in which man-to-man combat is the only template the public, and especially the media, understand. If next year?s local and regional elections continue to show the Tories running below 30 per cent support, it may become clear to more of them that they need someone else, a man of old-fashioned punch and chutzpah, to kick Blair where it hurts. Maybe IDS has answered the question about a new Tory identity. But maybe at the same time he is paving the way for a bigger man, the acme of progressive centrism, to make it sing. Michael Portillo has ruled himself out. Step forward, one day before the next general election, Kenneth Clarke.