A Fractious Rabble

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes:

David Cameron has said that the circumstances in which the Conservative conference was opening were “not ideal”.

Fans of the late – but immortal – Peter Cook may remember his incarnation as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, the great British eccentric, who told an interviewer about his lifelong endeavour to teach ravens to fly under water.

Asked if this task was not somewhat difficult, Streeb-Greebling hummed and hawed before replying, “I think ‘difficult’ is an awfully good word you’ve got there.”

I think “not ideal” are awfully good words to describe the prime minister’s predicament. In many ways things were looking rather good for him.

Unemployment is falling; growth is happening; in polls the Tories rate far ahead of Labour for economic competence, as Cameron is ahead of Ed Miliband in person; the Labour conference was embarrassing.

The Tories should have begun their own last conference before the election on a high note.

Instead of which the headlines are dominated by a defection and a resignation, and Cameron faces a party that he knows has never liked him, but which now looks like a fractious rabble.

Has it really come to this?

Has what was the most successful political party in modern European history succumbed to some strange death wish, determined to tear itself to pieces and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

Forty years ago the Tories were the European party (and Labour the insular Europhobes). But a perfervid obsession with the European Union, which is – in any objective view – almost the least of our many problems, has infected the Tories, and corroded any spirit of loyalty.

MP Mark Reckless was the second of two defectors to Ukip, timing his departure in a way that ordinary Tories would once have considered despicably treacherous.

But he may be not be the last, from a party that now seems to have adopted the Leninist notion of revolutionary defeatism.

Several times over its history the Tory party has succumbed to bouts of internecine squabbling – over the Corn Laws, over “tariff reform”, over appeasement.

But there was always a default mechanism, a ruthless will to win, which made it so astoundingly successful. Of the 111 years from 1886 to 1997, the Conservatives were in office – alone or in coalition – for 79.

That was not how it was meant to be in the age of mass democracy, the advent of universal suffrage, “the century of the common man”, but so it proved.

And it was not just their electoral success. To a degree now quite forgotten, British Conservatism was a genuine mass movement.

At the 1950 election, the Labour government retained power but lost many of the seats won in the landslide five years earlier. One of them was Barnet, north London, which Reginald Maudling took for the Tories.

Two details now seem barely credible.

In Barnet that year, turnout was 87%. And in a constituency with an electorate of just over 70,000, the local Conservative Association had 12,000 members.

At the time, the national Conservative and Unionist party had 2.7 million members, even if it was as much a social as a political organisation.

By the 2005 election membership had collapsed, to 253,000. And if rumours are true – and the party is reticent on the subject – it may now be below 100,000.

Membership of all parties has plummeted since the mid-century heyday, but whereas the Tories then had more than twice as many members as Labour, it is possibly now the other way round.

Although we have not seen “the end of history”, we’ve witnessed the decline of traditional ideological politics, which ought to have helped rather than hindered the Tories.

Instead, they have mysteriously assumed the doctrinaire fanaticism and internal hatreds that used to be the prerogative of the left.

Cameron may not be the most charismatic or sincere leader the Tories have ever had.

But could anyone have done better with this lot?