The Conservative party is, depending on your metaphorical preference, in a trough, becalmed, or perhaps, according to the psephologist Anthony King, on a "backward roll." Successive opinion polls and the results of the Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill by-elections have confirmed that the Tories are again in trouble. Although Tony Blair is distrusted, Michael Howard is trusted even less. Although the Labour party has forfeited support, the Tories have not yet benefited. Crises come frequently in the life of the modern Tory. But the notable difference now is that no one in the Conservative party has any idea what to do about them. There is no revolt, and as yet no open dissent - merely a low, moody grumbling, like distant summer storms that never seem to arrive and clear the air, but merely leave us sluggish, apprehensive and depressed.
The reason for this is, at one level, obvious. Michael Howard cannot be removed before the next general election, partly because it would be one assassination too many even for the Tory party and partly because there is no obvious successor. He was the choice of all because, for better or worse, there was no contest. All must, therefore, take responsibility for him. About this the great majority of Tories, albeit from differing standpoints, seem to agree.
In fact, the doubts about whether Howard's personality was sufficiently attractive to withstand the kind of trivial but probing media exposure that party leaders nowadays must expect have proved to be well grounded. His poll ratings show that as people have formed a view of the Conservative leader, it turns out to be negative. His media advisers are partly to blame. They tried to make him liked by the chattering classes rather than respected by the silent majority. They signed him up to gay marriages. They induced him to appear on a television chat show to discuss his own marriage and, like any half-decent husband in his early sixties, he froze. These tactics sold short the man.
Michael Howard is in many ways an admirable human being - brave, charming, witty and self-deprecatory. But he is also at fault for the current failure. Everyone wanted him to succeed. He was given a free hand - perhaps too free - like the receiver of an insolvent company. But Howard has turned out to be a better parliamentarian than politician. He cannot, it seems, distinguish a strategy from a tactic or a persuasive argument from a plea of last resort. He proves strangely relaxed about broad principles but fiercely obsessed with the narrowest of logical deficits. He is not merely stubborn, he manages to be most stubborn when he is most wrong. Everyone but Howard has known for months that the more he focused on the Iraq war, the higher the anti-war vote would go. But he refused to stop scratching the sore until it assumed the features of a tumour. Almost everyone has been arguing that the party had to offer big tax cuts to win back middle-class support and to stake out ground where Labour could not follow. But he has nitpicked, objected and hesitated so long that it will now be more difficult to portray whatever the party finally proposes as sensible or responsible.
And then there is Europe. It is the one issue which every Tory leader should know he has to get right. It is also the one issue on which Blair's views are at odds with those of the British people. Yet during the European election campaign, Howard managed to insult a large section of his own core vote by attacking their conviction that Britain should leave the EU as "extremist." And now, whatever he does to try belatedly to win them back will be ridiculed by Europhiles and meet with a wall of doubt from Eurosceptics. But if he fails to win them back, and if Ukip continues to poll well, the Conservative party may be out of government for at least another decade.
But Howard's personal qualities are not the root of Tory travails. To try to understand the latter, it is necessary to reach farther back into the party's history - back, in fact, to 1985, when Michael Howard and, more importantly, a certain John Major entered the Thatcher government. This, in retrospect, was the start of the trouble. In her memoirs, Thatcher records the circumstances: "When as a whip John Major came to the annual whips' lunch at Downing Street with the other whips, he disagreed with me about the importance of getting taxation down. He argued that there was no evidence that people would rather pay lower taxes than have better social services. I did not treat him or his argument kindly and some people… thought that he had ruined his chances of promotion. But in fact I enjoy an argument and when the whips' office suggested he become a junior minister I gave him the job."
Blood, sweat, tears and ink have been spilt on the Thatcher-Major relationship. Howard is one of the few to have maintained good relations with both of them. This, too, is perhaps a tribute to his qualities as a man rather than his perspicacity as a politician, because Tories in the end have to make a choice between one or the other's approach, and then be consistent about it.
The arguments between the Thatcherites and the Majorites about the two prime ministers' records remain of interest, even though the venom has largely drained out of them. What, though, is of much greater significance is the contrasting political outlooks of the two. And these are to be found embedded in this very first mention of Major in the Thatcher memoirs. She is keen on reducing taxes and has no time for doubters. He, looking already at the opinion polls and undoubtedly summing up the views of his colleagues and of the press, prefers higher public spending on welfare.
It is often said that Thatcher was more of a pragmatist and Major more of a reformer than the caricature of either allows. There is some truth in this. Margaret Thatcher was cautious and even on occasion - for example over NHS reform - quite timid. Her style was to state a basic principle and then advance a small step at a time towards its fulfilment.
Thatcher, though, was always an instinctive radical, sometimes constrained by circumstances and by colleagues. No one doubted this at the time and revisionism on the matter is misplaced. When the obstacles were insurmountable, she tried to go around them. When they looked weaker, she chipped away at them. And once they were removed, she did everything in her power to give effect to the principles and the beliefs which drove her.
John Major was the opposite. Indeed, as the years went by, he deliberately defined himself as the opposite. It wasn't that the actions of his government were in every respect more cautious that that of his predecessor. For example, with Howard as his home secretary, he applied consistent Conservative thinking for the first time in a generation to criminal justice policy. He even privatised the railways, which has not exactly redounded to his government's glory but certainly displays a kind of reckless boldness. Yet for Major, the wisest course seemed, whenever possible, to calculate the forces at work and examine the arguments in play, and then to split the difference. He was a cunning political horse-trader. But he was hopelessly unsuited to the intellectually taxing task of formulating a view and the morally exhausting business of pursuing it. By nature amiable and even emollient, he was as prime minister highly intolerant. Precisely because he had no core beliefs, he could only view dissent as at best childish and at worse malign. Had he enjoyed a university education, perhaps John Major could have made a successful career in the British foreign office, which specialises in endless, formless, pointless negotiation. But, as is well known, when Major tried to split the difference over Europe, he split the Conservative party instead. That helped to finish him, and it nearly finished the party as well.
Major is no longer a powerful or respected figure in the Conservative party. Of his former ministerial colleagues, most have also ceased to wield influence - although Malcolm Rifkind, a Majorite to the quick, is clearly anxious to force his way back to the front line and may yet do so. But Howard has evidently inherited much from Major's approach to Tory politics. The new leader's first public statement, declared in a code which every seasoned Tory-watcher could understand, was this: "I will lead this party from its centre." In other words, said Howard: "I shall not lead the party from the right, or even the centre-right. I shall avoid anything like a return to radicalism or a flirtation with risk. I shall split the difference. I am with Major, not Thatcher."
At the dinner held to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Thatcher's becoming prime minister, Howard delivered a generous tribute. He boldly declared: "What you stood for then, we stand for now." At one level, he certainly meant it. But at another level, it is much less clear that he understood its implications.
The thatcher approach was to preach a message and then try to put it into effect. No less important, the Thatcher assumption was that the preaching would be persuasive because somewhere in the depths of the British national psyche it would strike a chord. Just as Disraeli saw working-class Tories as "angels in marble" - that is, natural conservatives awaiting only the inspired touch of the sculptor to emerge as Conservative voters - so Thatcher and her closest colleagues believed in a natural conservative majority. Keith Joseph was alluding to this when he urged the Tory party, in opposition in the 1970s, to seek out the "common ground," rather than the centre ground. The common ground, he argued, was composed of the shared values, beliefs, instincts and attachments that united people from diverse socioeconomic groups and different party-political traditions. The centre ground, by contrast, was simply where the professional politicians and the media class considered that the respectable middle was properly located. Moreover, the intellectual trend was to shift the centre farther and farther to the left. By contrast, the common ground was situated well to the right. So, for example, in the 1970s and 1980s, on issues like trade union power, inflation, tax rates, home ownership, crime and immigration, millions of people felt disenfranchised by the prevailing political consensus: break that consensus and one could unlock that support.
In Britain, Tory success under Margaret Thatcher depended on embracing and acting upon that analysis. In America, the Republicans under Ronald Reagan did the same. Just as Reagan believed that there was a "spirit" of America which could be evoked and activated, so did Thatcher believe that there was a definite British "character" - a favourite word - which could become the basis of a non-socialist British political, social and economic order. This view can be ridiculed, but it can be neither disproved nor discounted. The policies to which it gave rise ensured the transformation of Britain into the leading power in Europe - and the Tory party, while such thinking prevailed, into the natural party of government.
The Major years did not substantially change Britain, but they did change the Conservative party. Most obviously, by leading to its catastrophic defeat, they diminished its size, and thus the talent pool from which a new group of leaders could emerge. At the same time, they also destroyed Tory organisation in whole swathes of the country. But the Major legacy had deeper effects than that. So far were the party's leading figures enmeshed in the shifts of approach and of philosophy which occurred with Thatcher's departure, that they could not frankly admit what they had got wrong. If they, the party leaders, were not to blame, then the party itself must be.
This happened to fit in with the analysis of another, highly politically educated, group of Tories. For them, the obvious analogy was to be found in the Labour party. Viewing the transformation of the party of Foot and Kinnock into Tony Blair's New Labour, some young Conservatives hungered for "New Tory." Drawing on the parlance of advertising, mesmerised by focus groups, often lacking the instincts (or, as they might say, prejudices) that influenced an older generation, they set about their task with a will. They proudly called themselves "modernisers," and every Tory nostrum was to be challenged in the name of modernity - attachment to the free market, hostility to trade union power, support for the traditional family, scepticism about Europe. Had the process of modernisation been restricted to ways of refining a political message and communicating it, or to the most advanced means of canvassing, or to a sweepout of some of the elderly residents of 32 Smith Square, it could have been beneficial. But modernisation was never mainly about that. The modernisers wanted to get their hands on the central levers of power, not in order to improve what existed, but rather to import a revolution.
Like all revolutions, this one has, from time to time, consumed its children. And, again like all revolutions, the frenetic search for Tory modernity has become madder and still madder. Self-accusation became a prominent characteristic of this collective dementia. The party took to routinely accusing itself of racism, sexism and homophobia. The chairman of the party, Theresa May - one of those finger-wagging nonentities who flourish when the political thought police are in charge - even described Conservatives at their 2003 party conference as "the nasty party." To the modernisers, the project was proceeding as intended. The growing chaos was proof that the final crisis was at hand: a bright new dawn would rise from the ashes of a soon to be incinerated Iain Duncan Smith. Instead, though, they got Michael Howard.
The would-be Tory revolutionaries were not foolish in wanting change. They were merely wrong to act like a Trotskyite sect and to seek to impose a revolution. They should have tried to rebuild, not to reinvent, the Conservative party. Their preoccupation with Tony Blair led them to draw false parallels and thus to try to impose inappropriate remedies which rapidly threatened the life of the patient. They failed to grasp that when the Labour party moves to the right - that is, when it seeks to occupy what today is the common ground - it is self-destructive for a right-wing party like the Tories to shift left.
The modernisers did not appreciate how far-reaching had been the Thatcher victory in the battle of ideas during the 1980s. They accordingly abandoned Thatcherism at the very point at which it had achieved the standing of a near consensus. Rather than sharpening their Thatcherite Tory radicalism, they scooped up the intellectual detritus of the left from the political gutter into which Labour had cast it, and tried to turn it into a coherent ideology. The modernisers thought that they were rejecting the failures of the Major years, but in truth they were perpetuating them. Modernisation, now that its most vocal adherents have dispersed and its only charismatic spokesman, Michael Portillo, is leaving politics, looks ever more clearly what it really is - just one more sad aspect of John Major's legacy. The doctrine was conceived in panic, gestated in confusion and born in despair. And Major deserves all the credit, and all the blame, for its paternity.
Which brings the story back to Majorism and back to poor, struggling Michael Howard. "Leading from the centre" - a clunking phrase that might have been pulled from some remaindered lexicon of Majorisms - has led Howard where it always leads the Tories in modern times: to the edge of the precipice. Every time that Howard hears himself accused of opportunism, he should recall that this taunt is the price he is paying for the elevation of centrism into a strategy. Of course, had Howard chosen to lead from the right he would have been accused of other things. He would have been an extremist, or a bigot, or a man of the past. But he would not now see his reputation for political integrity in shreds or have so disquieted his supporters.
The modern Conservative party can only be led effectively from the right. This now seems to have received some recognition, with the return of the articulate right-wing John Redwood to the shadow cabinet in the latest reshuffle. But it smacks of tactics: there is still no apparent understanding by Howard and his advisers of the strategic logic. In fact, for two inescapable reasons today's Tory leadership has to head rightwards. The first is that there is no longer a Tory centre and there are no Tory centrist MPs. This is because the leading issues of the day no longer allow it. It would, indeed, be possible to embrace a centrist view about, say, the speed of welfare reform or the precise level of income tax. But in such questions as whether Britain is to be inside or outside a European megastate, or whether Tories are to cut tax significantly or spend even more than Labour, or whether mass immigration is to be stopped or welcomed, there is no credible middle way.
The second reason why any successful Tory leader today would be well advised to drop any trace of centrism in favour of a rightward shift is that it is on the classic right-wing/common-ground issues that some chance of advance is now possible. If the economy were in crisis, or public services in complete collapse, or if war or terrorism were the public's exclusive preoccupations, what used to be called a "doctor's mandate" might just be enough. As it is, not even such putative crises as these would now give hope for a Conservative victory, since Tony Blair's reputation for strong leadership exceeds that of Michael Howard.
Not all Tory guns have misfired. The party has shown that it has policies to improve both health and education - anything which reduces a haemorrhage of electoral support in such areas is welcome - though this has foolishly been combined with public spending pledges that make any tax proposals much less credible. The party has also begun a spirited fight back on law and order, after inexplicably allowing David Blunkett for the last few years to pose as Britain's answer to the Lone Ranger. Nothing induces a return to Tory common sense like a dose of panic. And there will undoubtedly now be more of both. Even the party's clever young advisers know that on topics like crime levels, unmanaged immigration, the tax burden - and (with some eating of words) on Europe too - the Labour party would find it hard to compete. The frequently heard argument that such a strategy was tried and failed under William Hague does not hold water. Hague's silly soundbites - not least the clearly mendacious proposition that there were only "x days to save the pound" - were seen simply as proof of his lack of seriousness. By contrast, Howard is manifestly serious. In the end, though, Tories should privately accept that even fighting on such favourable territory - pitching their tents on the common ground of popular politics - will probably not deliver up victory next year. The electoral mountain is too high, past mistakes are too numerous, the economy is still too strong - and they have left it all far, far too late - for that now to be a realistic hope.
Yet hope of a sort there should be. Although Margaret Thatcher was not by nature an optimist, she was, for all that, hopeful, and her hopes proved justified. Tory hopes are justified still. The Conservative party, despite its problems, even on occasion despite itself, is doomed to flourish as long as it remains true to its natural role. It is the middle-class party in a country where the nation is increasingly middle class and increasingly resents an expensive and intrusive state. It is the patriotic party at a time when the British are increasingly keen to determine their own destiny. It is - and the sensitivities of saying so do not negate the fact - the only party which the growing "clash of civilisations" in our cities will leave unequivocally representing the law-abiding, liberty-loving majority. Hope implies confident expectation, but it usually also requires patience. The Tories should be both confident and patient.
