Courage, Mrs May: minority rule can work

Jim Callaghan guided his restless party through choppy political waters and this PM can do so, too

Minority government is a grind, with the Whips’ Office becoming more important than the great offices of state. From February 1974 to May 1979, I saw the inner workings of the last minority administration to survive more than a few months. Few of us Labour MPS thought it would last as long as it did. The lesson is that voters expect Parliament to live with the result they voted for.

After the election in October 1974 gave Labour a three seat majority, Harold Wilson was surprised to be in No 10 again. He was in a more powerful position than Theresa May is in now, but like her he was not up for the long haul. He had a very personal target, however: to deliver the promised referendum on membership of the Common Market and have the result generally accepted. This he achieved in June 1975. Theresa May’s personal target is to deliver an agreement to leave the EU by October 2018, the date Michel Barnier has set as necessary for a formal exit from the EU at the end of March 2019.

The question of whether May should remain for that period is not for anyone other than Conservative MPS to decide. Can she last? From the experience of 1974, my answer is a conditional “yes”.

The contenders to replace her have to want to form a realistic united inner Cabinet and postpone a party leadership election for an agreed period of, say, 18 to 24 months.

Are David Davis, Sir Michael Fallon, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson and Amber Rudd the present day equivalents of James Callaghan, Tony Crosland, Michael Foot, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins, all of whom fought to be prime minister in 1976, having postponed their leadership contest until Wilson resigned? My answer is again “yes”, with one qualification, and that concerns the Chancellor. Hammond is the big question mark today. He has every right to feel aggrieved at his treatment by the Prime Minister before and during the election. But he cannot behave again as he did over the weekend, briefing both ways on the single market and customs union.

Coalitions and deals will obviously have their place. In 1977, the Lib-lab pact between David Steel and Callaghan helped the survival of our government, in which I was foreign secretary. But discussing the situation with Callaghan on frequent flights together, I was left in no doubt that the underpinnings were meetings between Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. These delivered crucial Northern Irish votes. So let not the inevitable badinage today about DUP votes and deals obscure reality, which is that politics is and will remain a tough business. Blood is left on the carpet.

In Callaghan’s case, once he had taken over from Wilson, the office of minority PM made the man. He liked negotiations. He was good at them. He held his core group of ministers together with consummate skill, showing great respect to different factions. While Theresa May has not shown such diplomacy in the past, no one should underestimate her resilience. Not only has she fought an election and endured the consequences of its result, but she has dealt with the double blow of constant terror attacks and the dreadful fire at Grenfell Tower.

There is no doubt her task is difficult. But if she can build a new spirit of cooperation, it is possible that this parliament will deliver exit from the EU as the first stage. It may be the next parliament delivers the second stage – namely as a party to the European Economic Area while we negotiate the detailed implementation of an EU-UK trade agreement.

To achieve that, cooperation must be not just within the Conservative Party and the DUP but across the House. Sir Keir Starmer should be made a Privy Counsellor, as David Davis suggests, because there needs to be a measure of cross-party agreement as there was before the referendum in 1975. The alternative is to bring home a deal that does not carry support, and that would be far more politically destabilising than anything we are witnessing today.

Well before then, this Government’s fate might have been settled by something out of its control: the Grim Reaper and by-elections. In March 1979, when Margaret Thatcher called a vote of no confidence, Callaghan decided it was too much to drag in a very weak Alfred Broughton, who was attending in an ambulance though on his death bed. We lost by a single vote.