Don’t panic! She’s not Theresa Major. . . yet
THE disgruntled backbencher didn’ t pull his punches. ‘It’s like 1997 all over again,’ he told me. ‘We’re sitting here with our head up our backsides hoping for a miracle. And a miracle isn’t coming.’
Tory MPs returned to Westminster last week to find a doom- laden new narrative being constructed. Conservatism is facing an existential crisis unparalleled since Tony Blair smugly announced ‘ a new dawn has broken’. In front of their eyes, Theresa May is morphing into Theresa Major.
The doom-mongers need to get a grip. In the wake of the Election, the Tory Party remains stunned. ‘It will take at least another year to fully sink in,’ one Minister admitted. But though shell-shocked, the party is not mortally wounded. And, so long as it keeps its head, it is certainly not facing the same fate that befell John Major and his infamous Cabinet of ‘bastards’.
Much of this hand-wringing is a product of Mrs May’s announcement of her intention to stay in Downing Street ‘for the long term’. ‘If she stays, we’ll be destroyed,’ one MP wailed to me, in an echo of John Redwood’s ‘no change, no chance’ slogan from his 1995 leadership bid.
And, yes, the Tory Party probably would be destroyed if they forced the PM into another head-on collision with the voters in 2022. But they’re not going to do it, and she’s not going to let them do it.
FOR all the brave talk of not being a quitter, the PM will be 67 at the time of the next Election. I don’t know a single Cabinet member who seriously sees her putting herself through another campaign, let alone another five years in office post-2022 – and that includes Mrs May herself.
Then there are the supposedly crippling divisions over Europe. During the summer, a sense of crisis has enveloped the Brexit negotiations. Little progress appears to have been made. Our European partners have been accused of acting like gangsters. ‘They’re trying to play time against money,’ David Davis fumed.
Yet against this backdrop, the party has remained broadly united. There was a flurry of excitement on Thursday when a letter from the Eurosceptic wing demanded Mrs May maintain a tough stance on single market and customs union withdrawal. But in the 1990s, rebels weren’t writing letters – they were ambushing Ministers, mounting leadership challenges and bringing the Government to its knees.
There will be plenty of opportunity for such carnage to be repeated. But one fundamental will not change. No assault on the Government can be mounted without an assault on Brexit itself. As a Minister put it: ‘The choice facing the Eurosceptics is simple. Stick with us and you get your Brexit. It may not be perfect, but if we win in 2022, then you can spend your time building a better Brexit. Or, you can work against us, in which case you get Cor- byn and Starmer, and the Brexit revolution is junked.’
And there is one other crucial difference between the Conservative Party of 1997 and that of 2017. That difference is the Labour Party.
Labour in the 1990s was driven forward by a process of ideological renewal. Defeat in an Election many had expected to win, followed by the tragic death of its leader, forced the party to think the unthinkable. The decision to occupy the centre ground opened up acres of electoral space to be cultivated. Tony Blair and his colleagues found themselves flying free.
Corbyn’s surprisingly good result in June has had the opposite effect. Labour is now in a hard-Left straitjacket.
As this month’s ‘victory rally’ in Brighton will demonstrate, one more Corbynite heave is the only strategy on offer, and will be pursued until 2022. Which, paradoxically, provides the Conservatives with an opportunity they did not have in 1997. They are not bound by a manifesto rejected at the ballot box by as many voters as endorsed it. If they choose, they too can fly free. O F COURSE, Tory MPs may choose to do the opposite. They could insist on driving Britain t oward a cat astrophic cliffedge Brexit. They may well continue to try to counter Corbynism with heated- up Milibandism. Jacob ReesMogg might be invited to bring his unique 18th Century world view to the Cabinet table.
But it is not yet written. Immediately after the Election, I thought we had experienced another Black Wednesday moment. That day when Britain crashed out of the ERM, the Tories’ fate was sealed. But the opinion polls – for what they’re worth – tell a different story. Corbyn has yet to build a comparable lead.
I was working as a Labour researcher in 1997. You could see the future in the dead eyes of Ministers and Tory MPs.
Though dimmed, this morning there is still some light in the eyes. The nation is still a long way off casting its final j udgment. So despite t he doom-mongers, the Conservative Party’s fate rests in its own hands. At least for now.
THE announcement by Shadow Culture Minister Tom Watson that a Labour Government would ban betting company sponsorship from football shirts won plaudits last week. But it’s not clear this message has reached the member for West Bromwich East’s home-town club. Last month West Bromwich Albion unveiled a lucrative shirt-sleeve sponsorship deal with 12Bet. I’M told civil servants have been brushing up on their Japanese after Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt informed them he wants his NHS reforms to be underpinned by ‘Kaizen Principles’. Hunt, who lived in the country for two years, reportedly believes Kaizen – the Japanese theory of ‘continuous improvement’ – is key to curing Health Service bureaucracy. ‘He keeps telling everyone who will listen that Kaizen is the future of the NHS, ’ a mole informs me. Let’s just hope something doesn’t get lost in translation.