10.05.2005
The Conservative Party conference: a report, part II
[Posted 2:48 PM by David Pryce-Jones]
The annual Conservative conference at Blackpool is of course a stage-managed event, and its main purpose is to boost activists attending from all over the kingdom. They have been through the shot and shell of local constituency politics. Demoralized after three straight and unprecedented defeats by the Labour Party, they swing between defeatism and determination to renew their Party. Experienced judges of character, they have to choose a new leader with the will and the ability to defeat Labour at the next election in four years time. The British two-party system demands it, and so does the psychological health of everyone at this conference.
Primaries of this kind are really rather bare and one-dimensional, in that the candidates have to measure every word. For fear of the wrong nuance, they have to speak in guarded code. Nobody is going to lay out anything like a concrete programme in an arena lie this, suited to boosterism rather than debate. Personality is what counts – appearance, charm, conviction and other imponderables which send the activists away muttering to each other, �I like him, I can trust him.�
David Cameron has plenty of these imponderables. A tall man, easy going, he spoke for about twenty minutes without notes or an autocue. This was a most professional performance for someone of 38, widely written down by the Labour Party and its claque in the media as too young for office. Youth is on his side, in fact. His supporters include the best of the recent intakes of Conservative members of parliament, for instance Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, and George Osborne, all of whom seem destined for high office one day. Everyone was much impressed with Cameron, and gave him a standing ovation.
Up to joust against him came Kenneth Clarke, once Chancellor of the Exchequer, a grandee from the white-hot times of Margaret Thatcher and the dying embers of John Major. Suitably decoded, his line was that boys like Cameron need to mature for long years to come � old heads like his are best. Never mind that he will be around seventy when the next election comes � wasn�t Winston 76 when he won his last election ? He landed some good blows on Blair and his putative successor Gordon Brown, and promised that if he were Conservative leader he�d land a lot more. People have only to trust him, and not to make the rejoinder that the Party might be better off if he had played this heavy-weight part during the eight years of the Blair blight, when in fact he was busy making money. Still, everyone was much impressed with Clarke, and gave him a standing ovation too.
Now the Conservatives are a Party dubious about the supposed glories of the European Union, poised to bid Brussels the fondest of farewells. Throughout his career, Clarke has proclaimed that salvation lies in the EU, and suddenly lo and behold, in a speech making his pitch to be prime minister in waiting, he has nothing to say on the subject. Not a single word. Once the standing ovation stopped, surmise set in. If really he were Party leader, he would be hard put to reconcile his views with almost everyone else�s. The likelihood is a split, perhaps a realignment of Clarkites with the Liberal Democrats, and a parody would follow of the stalemate currently obtaining in Germany. The Tories can save themselves, but they may also head for outer darkness.