And another thing…

AFTER the broo-haha last week over alleged anti-Conservative bias in the Tardis, I thought it might be of interest to readers to see how Doctor Who has, occasionally, been ahead of the curve politically.

This is a clip from Terror of the Zygons, originally broadcast in September 1975 – nearly four years before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister (though months after she beat Heath to become Conservative leader). It’s followed by a clip of Tom Baker reminiscing about making it and having a laugh about how prescient the writers turned out to be regarding the arrival of a female Prime Minister.

Apologies for the apparently shaky camera work: it’s actually because my old VCR has seen better days.

A NIGHTMARE! The evil Baron Cameronstein in hellish communion with four of his predecessors.

At the risk of sounding like an American, happy Hallowe’en…

I’M HOPING that this particular brain teaser will ellicit some useful information.

Remember Dave’s “detoxification strategy”? This was his attempt at reinventing the Conservative Party to try to persuade the electorate that it was completely different from the one that screwed up the country so badly during 18 years in power. “Vote for us – we’re not nasty any more, honest” was one of the slogans rejected for the relaunch, I believe.

So, having accepted that the leaderships of Thatcher, Major, Hague, IDS and Howard were entirely poisonous for the Tory brand, where stand we now? How successful has the detoxification strategy actually been?

Given how reticent the Conservatives are about what they would actually do in government, it’s difficult to know. So here’s the big question for today:

In what policy area is today’s Conservative Party to the left of Margaret Thatcher’s government?

Simple enough question, I think you’ll agree. If the detox strategy has been genuine and not just a cosmetic exercise, Dave should be able to point to at least half a dozen areas where his party out-lefts Thatcher’s.

Alternatively, perhaps they can admit that in fact Cameron’s Conservatives are more right wing than any Tory opposition for… well, ever. And that if they formed a government, it would make Thatcher’s shower look like lefties. Pleasant thought.

But that would imply the detox strategy never worked! Oh dear…

I JUST COULDN’T bring myself to agree with the leader of the opposition. 

“What’s clear is that the government is falling apart and can no longer govern. I am calling for a general election,” he told the TV crew.

The Prime Minister had been formally challenged to step down to make way for an alternative leader. Unlike the current crisis, however, the leadership crisis in the Conservative Party nearly 20 years ago was based, not just on the personalities of Margaret Thatcher and her challenger, Michael Heseltine — but on real policy differences, namely the poll tax and Europe.

The programme on which the Conservatives had been elected three and a half years earlier was in disarray. MPs who had been elected on a mandate to introduce the poll tax now campaigned ferociously against their own party leader. The case for an early election was a strong one, and one which Neil Kinnock tried to exploit.

But even as I stood a few feet away from him (he was visiting Howwood as part of our campaign for the double Paisley by-election in Paisley in November 1990), I had my doubts. Parliaments can run for up to five years, provided the party in power can muster a majority. That remains my view.

David Cameron is calling for an election. Fair enough — that’s his job. But he also says he’s open-minded about the prospect of fixed-term parliaments, which would mean a governing party could change their leader a dozen times during any parliament without having to go to the country.

Strange times. But no time to panic.

I WONDER just how many Conservative Party members — and readers of this blog — are in agreement with Norman Tebbit?

It says a lot about the Tories that one of their elder statesmen, a former Trade and Industry Secretary and party chairman, should be threatened with expulsion from his party for telling voters not to vote for his party.

Tebbit is still very close to Baroness Thatcher. I wonder if she would be similarly threatened by David Cameron had she, not Tebbit, offered that advice to voters?

The fact is that the majority of Conservative Party members are more in tune with Tebbit and with UKIP’s policies on Europe — ie, withdrawal — than with their own party’s policies. Tebbit’s crime has been to be honest with the electorate, and that cannot be tolerated in David Cameron’s Conservative Party.

And if Cameron wants Tebbit to shut up because he genuinely doesn’t represent the party’s views on Europe, rather than because he’s threatening to blow the gaffe on his party’s moderate image, why doesn’t Cameron attempt, in the next few weeks, to make a positive case for engagement with the EU?

AS WE leave behind us the “celebrations” of The Feast of the Ascension of the Blessed Margaret, this comment from Nicky reminds us that many of the myths spread by Tories since then aren’t actually just myths: they’re complete fabrications.

Here are some myths surrounding Margaret Thatcher and the 1979 election.

1. Jim Callaghan was a complacent old duffer who said ‘Crisis? What crisis?’
2. The winter of 1978/79 was an apocalyptical vision of hell on earth with rubbish piled up in the streets and the dead unburied. These horrors are still used by the Tory Party to put the fear of God into the electorate.
3. Mrs Thatcher arrived like Boudicea to mend a broken country and a broken economy.
4. We are now in a parallel situation to 1979, because Labour have wrecked the economy and the Tories are going to have to sort it out.

Here’s some myth-busting:

1. Callaghan was a former lieutenant in the Navy during WW2. He was inculcated with the principle of staying calm in a crisis. He wasn’t complacent, but he was irritated by the hysteria in the press, particularly the Tory supporting Sun and Daily Mail. Having said that, his aide when he returned from an international meeting in the Caribbean knew Callaghan had misjudged the situation by lecturing the assembled reporters on not running the country down, and also adding he’d been quite relaxed during his time abroad and had even gone swimming in the sea. This resulted in the famous Sun headline ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ – which was actually the title of a 1975 album by prog rock band Supertramp. (The line came from the film ‘Day of the Jackal’, apparently.)

2. The winter of discontent was pretty bad, although not actually the vision of hell that it’s hyped up to be. The bit about the dead going unburied for example – that was a two week unofficial strike which was confined to Liverpool. There was also the strike by refuse collectors in London which resulted in rubbish piling up in Leicester Square, which got a lot of media coverage. However, for most people life carried on pretty normally. By February 1979 the government had reached an agreement with the TUC (a concordat called the ‘The Economy, the Government, and Trade Union Responsibilities’ ) to bring the situation under control.

3. Ted Heath – deeply unpopular even with the Tories – had left the economy in a parlous state when Labour came to power in 1974. By 1979 considerable progress had been made in bringing down inflation and unemployment. The ground work for the bonanza of North Sea Oil had been done. Mrs Thatcher of course benefited from revenue of North Sea Oil. She could have used that to invest in British industry, but instead she decimated our industrial base (and made us reliant from coal from abroad) and squandered it all on unemployment benefit.

4. The Tories are desperately keen to present our economic woes as a home-grown recession, when it quite obviously isn’t. It’s a global economic crisis. Also, exactly how is Cameron going to ‘fix’ the situation? Has he got a vast windfall from North Sea Oil, or has he got any utilities to sell off? Unfortunately for him, he hasn’t.

HERESY alert…

What comes across loud and clear from Thatcher fans on this site and elsewhere is a refusal to acknowledge the facts of Thatcher’s reign.

How many of her modern-day adherents, for example, volunteer the admission that until the Falklands crisis in 1982, she was a miserably unpopular Prime Minister? Does anyone even remember that Michael Foot held a double-digit lead over her after he became leader of the Labour Party?

And how much of her 1983 and 1987 victories were owed, not to her leadership, but to the implosion of the Labour Party and the split by the SDP?

Are any of her supporters willing to concede that, following her attempt to introduce the poll tax, her party had an opinion poll deficit of more than 20 per cent to Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party? 

They still bemoan her loss, don’t they, these unreconstructed Thatcherites? You can almost hear them today, claiming that she could have gone on to win a fourth successive victory for her party. This is a lie. I wish she had stayed as Prime Minister: I vividly recall seeing her enforced departure from Number 10 as a very bad sign indeed for my own party’s electoral prospects. The only reason the Conservatives won in 1992 was that they had had the very good sense to ditch a terminally unpopular leader who had lost her political instinct.

I admit she was a strong leader who took advantage of that image to exploit the weakness of a divided opposition. And many of her reforms were necessary and good (legally obliging unions to ballot their members before strike action, for instance).

But she was not the electoral asset to her party which is often claimed and today is as good a day as any to remind ourselves of that.

Iain Dale, one of the Baroness’s greatest fans, reminds us today of the words the new Prime Minister spoke when she first entered Downing Street 30 years ago:

Where there is discord, may I bring harmony
Where there is error, may I bring truth
Where there is doubt, may I bring faith
Where there is despair, may I bring hope

Perhaps, as she read those words from the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi, she meant them. But from the perspective of 30 years, it just looks like she was having a laugh, and an ironic and not very funny one at that.

TODAY is a big day in the calendar of British Conservatives — the 30th anniversary of the last time their party moved from opposition to government.

But going by most of the coverage in the blogscape, you could be forgiven for believing that today is a religious festival: The Feast of the Ascension of the Blessed Margaret might be an appropriate name. 

This is a revealing time for David Cameron’s party; the economic crisis has given them the opportunity to revert to type: the sighs of relief from Central Office were almost audible when they were released from their commitments to match Labour spending plans and were able to revert to their default position of slashing public spending, particularly the budgets of the hated public sector.

And today’s anniversary exposes the Tories as unapologetic adherents to a political philosophy which was so divisive that Tory MPs themselves were forced to bring it to a dramatic end.

If the Conservatives were to win the next general election, Cameron’s premiership would be judged — at least by his own party — by how closely he aped his esteemed predecessor’s values and style. If his claims to represent a “new” form of “compassionate” Conservatism turn out to be true, he will be found wanting by his party, just as John Major was. 

Meanwhile, today is an appropriate time to challenge the Thatcher worshippers on an overlooked conundrum: if Thatcher’s philosophy really did change the country irreversibly for the better, why do so many of her worshippers followers adherents supporters now believe that Britain, after 12 years of a Labour government, is the worst place in the world to live, variously comparing it (laughably) to Zimbabwe and Soviet-era Russia? Were the Iron Lady’s reforms so insubstantial, transient and superficial that they left no long-lasting footprint on the political, social or economic landscape?

THERE’S a well-worn quote which been used by various people down the years to illustrate the attitude of the Conservative Party to public transport:

Any man who finds himself on a bus after the age of 30 can count himself a failure.

It’s almost always attributed to Baroness Thatcher and in years gone by I have blithely used it to make the (quite legitimate) point that public transport, and particularly the bus industry, has never been at the top of the Tories’ agenda.

But just last year I began to voice my doubts about the veracity of the attribution. Something about the quote just didn’t seem right, politically helpful though it was. Mrs Thatcher had many faults, but she was surely too astute a politician to express publicly anything so crass and patronising.

So grateful thanks to Sebastian Shakespeare who, in today’s Notebook in the Evening Standard, provides some much-needed clarity. He confirms that the originator of the quote is not Thatcher but  Loeila, Duchess of Westminster.

Unless someone somewhere can come up with a more authoritative source confirming the quote as Thatcher’s, I will have to formally decree her to be innocent of concocting such a smear against the travelling (male, over-30s) public.

THE vote of confidence in the Commons in March 1979 is one of my earliest political memories. I remember watching News at Ten with my parents when the bulletin flashed across the screen that the government had lost (I seem to recall a black and white sketch of Big Ben with red writing across it saying something like “Government defeated”, but can’t be sure how accurate that recollection is).

I’m reminded of this because, as those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen, I’m catching up on the series of programmes broadcast by BBC Parliament last month on the fall of the last Labour government.

I was a 15-year-old schoolboy at the time. After the initial vote of confidence, I don’t remember much about the campaign itself. I do remember going to Beith cinema on the evening of polling (I can’t remember what was showing) and popping into my regular sweet shop afterwards and the owner, with whom my friends and I were quite friendly, telling us he was hoping for a Conservative victory. This was quite a shock, since we had assumed that everyone we knew was a Labour supporter.

That night, I stayed up to keep my mum company as she watched the results come in. She was a Labour supporter all her life, but she never hated any one person more than she hated Margaret Thatcher. I vividly remember the one cheerful moment for her — when the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Teddy Taylor, unexpectedly lost his seat to Labour’s John Maxton. It was Labour’s only gain from the Tories at that election. It still tickles me — and I know it delighted mum when she thought about it years later — to know that John Maxton’s successor as Cathcart MP was sitting a few feet from her that evening.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to claim that the Tories were going to be in government for a long time. But that was not the general view at the time. Before Labour chose implosion over its duty to oppose the government, Thatcher was seen as being very much on probation; it was known that many in her own party were not confident she would be a successful prime minister. So it was a surprise to hear my social education (don’t ask) teacher, Mr Clarke, announce to our class the week after the election that the Conservatives would be in government “for the next ten or 15 years.”

Teachers, eh? What do they know…?