Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 10 January 2004

Michael Howard is my Aunt Maude

Six months can be an awfully long time in politics. When I wrote here only last July that the Tories knew in their hearts they could never win an election under Iain Duncan Smith, few of them cared to admit that publicly. Even now, when the Tory coup has an eerie inevitability about it with hindsight, how many people can honestly say they guessed a year ago that Michael Howard would become leader by the year’s end? He has been compared with Disraeli; I don’t suppose many Tories remember John Bright’s words at the time of Dizzy’s accession to the Tory leadership. It was ‘a triumph of intellect and courage and patience and unscrupulousness in the service of a party full of prejudices and selfishness and wanting in brains’. A brilliantly apt description in 1868 — and now?

But the defenestration of IDS presented me with what my friend Michael Kinsley, the Washington Post columnist, calls an Aunt Maude dilemma. ‘Dear, rich old Aunt Maude’ has staged a remarkable recovery, and the doctors say she could live another 30 years. ‘You are delighted, of course. And yet you can’t help thinking about the money.’ Mike had in mind Howard Dean, who had to cheer through gritted teeth when Saddam Hussein was found in his burrow, although he knew it was bad news for him politically. Michael Howard is my own Aunt Maude (as it were). The Tory party seemed to rise from its deathbed, showing something like its old ruthlessness, just as I had agreed to write a book with the not wholly original but at least self-explanatory title The Strange Death of Tory England. Anyone who merely wants parliamentary government to survive must long for a revived opposition, and yet, if the Tories win a landslide at the next election, my book might look a little forlorn.

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