It's not just British Conservatives who are in trouble: all over the world, rightwing politics are in crisis Jonathan Freedland Wednesday August 22, 2001 The Guardian
We should probably be grateful. In a late summer starved of entertainment - where a too-late cricket victory vies with a remade Planet of the Apes to provide us with August thrills - we ought really to give thanks to the Tories. They have served up a summer drama to put ITV's efforts to shame, each episode ending with a cliffhanger. Tory Story has had it all: betrayal, hatred, even that time-honoured staple of soap - the queeny matriarch loved by a few and condemned as a dragon by everyone else.
The Conservative leadership contest began as a nerds' delight, offering three rounds of nail-biting and number-crunching - crammed into a single week. Now, after a brief spell off the air, the saga is back with even juicier material. The backroom, Westminster plotting as 165 MPs lied and cheated their way to a photo-finish, has given way to an even less dignified spectacle. Before our very eyes, the Conservatives have become the party that ate itself.
Yesterday Margaret Thatcher condemned Ken Clarke, who once served at her side, as a disaster and a has-been. He shot back by accusing her of plotting to bring down John Major's government, hijacking every election campaign since and of being a dragon: "It's quite something to face Mrs Thatcher at your door," he said, "breathing fire under the doorway, coming in to threaten you".
As today's Guardian revelations make clear, Ken Clarke knows all about breathing fire - even travelling the world to promote the habit. He has been scathing too about his opponent, calling Iain Duncan Smith a "complete unknown" hell-bent on pulling Britain out of the European Union.
So it has raged on in that same poisonous vein. When Ann Widdecombe withdrew from the race, she blamed the nasty little pack of "backbiters" surrounding Portillo. In a radio debate on Sunday she several times snapped, "Oh, grow up!" to Alan Duncan - a member of her own party. He icily referred to her as "Miss Widdecombe" thereafter - a rancour that would have been absent if the pair had merely faced their nominal enemies in Labour.
For non-Tories - and my hunch is there are large numbers of Britons whose strongest political affiliation these days is antipathy to the Conservatives - this is all a wonderful amusement: blood sport for liberals. Tonight there will be a bumper dose, when Clarke and IDS meet in a cockfight courtesy of BBC2's Newsnight.
But for the Conservative party itself, and the wider cause of the centre-right, this is just dreadful. Leadership contests can be cleansing, clarifying processes for political parties: through them a movement can thrash out its differences and carve out a path for the future. The Labour contest which produced Neil Kinnock in 1983 had some of that quality; as did the 1992 Democratic primaries which finally settled on Bill Clinton. But what have the Tories done with the same opportunity?
They have not wrestled with competing plans for the future. Instead they have sat, like a pack of tired, rangy beasts, itching, as Alan Duncan says, at their own spots. Yesterday's "debate" centred on whether Thatcher had done more to undermine Major than Edward Heath had to derail Thatcher. The whole endorsement game - Thatcher for IDS, Major for Clarke - reeks of the same syndrome: a stale party, more concerned with settling old scores than speaking to the nation.
No wonder the Portillo people are turning puce with frustration. It was bad enough to see their man ejected last month; now they have seen the same happen to his agenda. No one is debating the challenge he threw down to his party: modernise or die. With their hands clamped on their ears, they dismissed the bouffant-haired prophet of doom - and went straight back into denial. The Conservatives now choose between two ostriches, two men who tell them - in admittedly different ways -they need not fret: nothing too drastic has to change.
How has this happened? Is this awful non-choice a mere quirk of personnel - a function of a Tory population so cut down by two successive Sommes in 1997 and 2001 that it simply had no better candidates available? Or does it point to a deeper malaise, a problem not just of the British Conservative party but of the centre-right itself?
Looking beyond these islands, it's tempting to see a crisis for rightwing politics of which the Tories are just another victim. Start with a superficial indicator: they lack a champion. There is not a role model for the right anywhere in the world. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were ideological guiding stars in the 1980s, but who is the right to follow now? When the best they can offer is George Bush in Washington, Silvio Berlusconi in Rome and Jose Maria Aznar in Madrid, you know they're in trouble. Jacques Chirac is hardly the fount of bold, new conservative thinking - instead he is outgunned daily by his socialist rival, Lionel Jospin. Who else can the right look to for inspiration? Ariel Sharon?
Notice, too, their silence on the great themes of our time. If the key question of the early 21st century is globalisation, where is the right? Where is the cogent, robust defence of world capitalism, the intellectual response to the protestors of Seattle? Where is free-market conservatism's Naomi Klein?
Instead the right seems strangely hobbled by its past. One wing cannot embrace the modern world because its hands are full carrying the baggage of social conservatism. In Britain that means Norman Tebbit, in the US it's the religious right: in both places it's the people who, at worst, saddle conservatism with intolerance and bigotry and, at best, make it look desperately old fashioned.
The other wing, fiscally conservative free-marketeers - think Duncan, Portillo et al - are also blocked by the conservative past. Their record as crusaders for privatisation in the 1980s and 1990s prevents them joining today's debate on where to draw the line between public and private. They have too little credibility: they are the party of Railtrack.
More widely, their very success has worked against them. As John Gray has argued, thanks to the free-market years so many of the institutions conservatives might exist to conserve - the local high street; the church; communites sustained by single industries (remember the pit villages) - have been swept away. Social conservatism can remember them nostalgically - but only by confronting fiscal conservatism. That means the old wet-dry divide (vaguely represented in the current clash of Clarke vs IDS), rather than a clear, rightwing response.
Instead those causes are increasingly left to others, including the left: it is the greens who bang on about the village shop now, not the Conservative party. The right is left bereft. Tony Blair, and modernisers like him around the world, have stolen their economic clothes; the institutions they used to defend have either vanished or are championed by others. There is nothing left for them to do - except to amuse the rest of us who look on, agog.