Spring In Its Step
The Conservative Party has a spring in its step again as can be seen from this upbeat article by Matthew Parris writing in The Times.
Nigel’s fruitcakes are back in their tin
By Matthew Parris - The Times
This week, the Ukip bandwagon began to lose momentum — and the Tories stopped being afraid of the shadows
To whatever gods there are, the Tory party should this weekend be offering thanks.
It should thank them for its patron saint, the Blessed Margaret. It should thank them for its present chancellor, who kept his nerve when others wobbled. It should thank them for its leader, David Cameron, whose speech on Wednesday summoned reserves we’d half-forgotten he had and refreshed a flagging Conservative sense of purpose.
But it should thank them too for a surprise benefactor. Ukip backfired. In an act of unintended self-sacrifice, Mark Reckless has reminded the Conservative party what a big, strong beast it is and what a small, mean rodent it isn’t and mustn’t become.
So thanks, rats, for revealing yourselves. Tories had been slipping into a habit of jumping at shadows. As the week proceeded, many at the Birmingham conference began to see that the shadows are only shadows. By the time I left Birmingham on Tuesday, you could sense a wave of self-affirmation: the party had remembered that there are people they can do without.
At this point I must take issue with my Times colleague, Daniel Finkelstein, with whose every word on Wednesday I agreed except his suggestion that we should all be polite about Ukip and its supporters. Why?
Stigma is an important force in morality and politics. We stigmatised the loony left — and rightly, even if we had delightful friends among them. There are delightful Ukip people too but they should be embarrassed at the company they’re in. We must remind them. Their party and its pitch are mad, bad and dangerous, and there are many nutters and racists attracted there. Say so.
Here goes, then. By being such a rat, by the shameless way he betrayed his own constituency party, by the spotlight shone on his serially disloyal behaviour as an MP, and by the way he played Useful Idiot to Nigel Farage’s plans to wreck the conference of a party on whose back he had clambered into politics, Mr Reckless showed them what he was made of. He showed them what Ukip was made of too. They didn’t like it. And all at once, they weren’t scared any more: just irritated and contemptuous. And the fact that Reckless had been so reckless began to turn the jitters to jeers — and even to giggles.
This autumn and this Tory conference was probably the last chance, barring accident, for a pre-election Revolt of the Right. I believe there had been something not far short of an internal party coup brewing. I’m far from alleging that many loyal rightwingers in the party would ever have been complicit in a plot — but mutinies may be not so much planned as borne on the wind of an emerging possibility.
A scenario had become believable in which the word “momentum” was key. Leakage of electoral support from the Conservatives to Ukip, a surge by that party (at Tory expense) in European and local elections, then a seemingly open-ended series of high-profile defections starting with Douglas Carswell and triumphs for Ukip in the consequential by-elections became imaginable.
Parts of the Conservative party were rattled into thinking about some kind of electoral truce. Some on the right were saying Tories should “focus on Ukip supporters’ concerns” (code for “adopt more right-wing policies”). Others were promoting the idea of individual constituency “pacts” where Ukip agreed not to stand against candidates from the Tory right. Many of these dreamers hoped, though few said, that the end game was a merger.
The dream was always madness; but in some quarters it was taking hold. Within the party there were murmurs about “dialogue”, and the need to treat these defectors with “respect” and try to “understand” why they had done it. The dream was alive.
The next phase, Douglas Carswell’s defection, did not go badly for the dream, both because Mr Carswell had earned some respect for his work in parliament, and because it at once looked very possible he could win his by-election and a subsequent general election. I have little doubt that a good handful of the hard right on the Tory backbenches began making calculations about their own chances.
There was a good deal of prattling about “honour”. We must nail this. It can be perfectly honourable to change party, for one of two reasons. A member may have changed his or her own politics. Alternatively he or she may feel it is their party that has changed its politics.
But nobody I know on the Tory right is a recent convert and no rightwinger could honestly suggest that Mr Cameron has moved to the left since they ran for election under his banner in 2010. They just want to wound him because they’ve failed to bounce him. That may be many things but it isn’t honour.
It’s very possible that for the day of Mr Cameron’s conference speech (surely the Tories’ most vulnerable moment) Ukip had in mind a defector more interesting than one obscure Tory donor, but in the end they didn’t get him. If so, I know why, and any observer at the conference could guess why. After Reckless, the mood swung sharply against the dream and against the dreamers personally. You could feel it in the air.
Quite simply, this was the wrong person, in the wrong manner, in the wrong constituency. The media couldn’t quite take Reckless seriously. Pollsters said he might lose the by-election, and would probably lose in the general election. MPs and delegates were dismayed, then angry, then scornful. A mood of defiance developed. “Good riddance” was on many lips. The dreamers re-ran their calculations. What if this momentum thing didn’t develop for Ukip? For all their talk of honour, few would consciously intend to lose their seat. From roosters on the right came no cock-a-doodle-dos. The usual suspects went rather quiet.
Then came Mr Cameron’s speech. This was a small masterpiece. It breathed a kind of Baldwinesque coherence: not around an ideology or -ism, but around an almost palpable sense of the sort of people and the sort of country many (not all) voters want us to be. The stuff about future taxation is, of course, a work of the imagination; but with imagination comes purpose, and a sense of personal purpose is what David Cameron has often failed to convey. He conveyed it on Wednesday.
The gods be praised. The fruitcakes are back in their tin.
This week, the Ukip bandwagon began to lose momentum — and the Tories stopped being afraid of the shadows
To whatever gods there are, the Tory party should this weekend be offering thanks.
It should thank them for its patron saint, the Blessed Margaret. It should thank them for its present chancellor, who kept his nerve when others wobbled. It should thank them for its leader, David Cameron, whose speech on Wednesday summoned reserves we’d half-forgotten he had and refreshed a flagging Conservative sense of purpose.
But it should thank them too for a surprise benefactor. Ukip backfired. In an act of unintended self-sacrifice, Mark Reckless has reminded the Conservative party what a big, strong beast it is and what a small, mean rodent it isn’t and mustn’t become.
So thanks, rats, for revealing yourselves. Tories had been slipping into a habit of jumping at shadows. As the week proceeded, many at the Birmingham conference began to see that the shadows are only shadows. By the time I left Birmingham on Tuesday, you could sense a wave of self-affirmation: the party had remembered that there are people they can do without.
At this point I must take issue with my Times colleague, Daniel Finkelstein, with whose every word on Wednesday I agreed except his suggestion that we should all be polite about Ukip and its supporters. Why?
Stigma is an important force in morality and politics. We stigmatised the loony left — and rightly, even if we had delightful friends among them. There are delightful Ukip people too but they should be embarrassed at the company they’re in. We must remind them. Their party and its pitch are mad, bad and dangerous, and there are many nutters and racists attracted there. Say so.
Here goes, then. By being such a rat, by the shameless way he betrayed his own constituency party, by the spotlight shone on his serially disloyal behaviour as an MP, and by the way he played Useful Idiot to Nigel Farage’s plans to wreck the conference of a party on whose back he had clambered into politics, Mr Reckless showed them what he was made of. He showed them what Ukip was made of too. They didn’t like it. And all at once, they weren’t scared any more: just irritated and contemptuous. And the fact that Reckless had been so reckless began to turn the jitters to jeers — and even to giggles.
This autumn and this Tory conference was probably the last chance, barring accident, for a pre-election Revolt of the Right. I believe there had been something not far short of an internal party coup brewing. I’m far from alleging that many loyal rightwingers in the party would ever have been complicit in a plot — but mutinies may be not so much planned as borne on the wind of an emerging possibility.
A scenario had become believable in which the word “momentum” was key. Leakage of electoral support from the Conservatives to Ukip, a surge by that party (at Tory expense) in European and local elections, then a seemingly open-ended series of high-profile defections starting with Douglas Carswell and triumphs for Ukip in the consequential by-elections became imaginable.
Parts of the Conservative party were rattled into thinking about some kind of electoral truce. Some on the right were saying Tories should “focus on Ukip supporters’ concerns” (code for “adopt more right-wing policies”). Others were promoting the idea of individual constituency “pacts” where Ukip agreed not to stand against candidates from the Tory right. Many of these dreamers hoped, though few said, that the end game was a merger.
The dream was always madness; but in some quarters it was taking hold. Within the party there were murmurs about “dialogue”, and the need to treat these defectors with “respect” and try to “understand” why they had done it. The dream was alive.
The next phase, Douglas Carswell’s defection, did not go badly for the dream, both because Mr Carswell had earned some respect for his work in parliament, and because it at once looked very possible he could win his by-election and a subsequent general election. I have little doubt that a good handful of the hard right on the Tory backbenches began making calculations about their own chances.
There was a good deal of prattling about “honour”. We must nail this. It can be perfectly honourable to change party, for one of two reasons. A member may have changed his or her own politics. Alternatively he or she may feel it is their party that has changed its politics.
But nobody I know on the Tory right is a recent convert and no rightwinger could honestly suggest that Mr Cameron has moved to the left since they ran for election under his banner in 2010. They just want to wound him because they’ve failed to bounce him. That may be many things but it isn’t honour.
It’s very possible that for the day of Mr Cameron’s conference speech (surely the Tories’ most vulnerable moment) Ukip had in mind a defector more interesting than one obscure Tory donor, but in the end they didn’t get him. If so, I know why, and any observer at the conference could guess why. After Reckless, the mood swung sharply against the dream and against the dreamers personally. You could feel it in the air.
Quite simply, this was the wrong person, in the wrong manner, in the wrong constituency. The media couldn’t quite take Reckless seriously. Pollsters said he might lose the by-election, and would probably lose in the general election. MPs and delegates were dismayed, then angry, then scornful. A mood of defiance developed. “Good riddance” was on many lips. The dreamers re-ran their calculations. What if this momentum thing didn’t develop for Ukip? For all their talk of honour, few would consciously intend to lose their seat. From roosters on the right came no cock-a-doodle-dos. The usual suspects went rather quiet.
Then came Mr Cameron’s speech. This was a small masterpiece. It breathed a kind of Baldwinesque coherence: not around an ideology or -ism, but around an almost palpable sense of the sort of people and the sort of country many (not all) voters want us to be. The stuff about future taxation is, of course, a work of the imagination; but with imagination comes purpose, and a sense of personal purpose is what David Cameron has often failed to convey. He conveyed it on Wednesday.
The gods be praised. The fruitcakes are back in their tin.
