The annual party conference has been the occasion of the destruction of a Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, within very recent history. But more than 40 years have passed since a leader was last created at a conference. That was back in 1963, also in Blackpool. Representatives had already gathered when news came through that the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was severely ill and had determined to stand down. It was far too late to bring events to a halt. The conference went on but ceased to be the well-ordered and deferential affair beloved of party managers. On the contrary, as Quintin Hogg at once spotted, this was a hustings. Hogg had recently returned from the United States where he had made a study of the techniques pioneered by John F. Kennedy’s Democrats. He resolved to put them into practice. Badges bearing the emblem ‘Q’ suddenly appeared on the floor, while he used his conference speech to announce, with a flourish, his candidacy.
When he stood up to speak, Quintin Hogg was arguably the favourite to win the leadership. He was certainly Macmillan’s chosen candidate, and the retiring Prime Minister’s views carried weight. By the time Hogg finished speaking, his chance was gone. He got his tone wrong by appearing too vulgar and ostentatiously ambitious. Rab Butler, the other front-runner, who was asked to stand in for the absent Macmillan, suffered the opposite problem. Anthony Howard, Butler’s biographer, records that his delivery was ‘flat and uninspiring’. By the time he sat down, his chance of becoming Tory leader had been irreparably damaged. Only one speaker emerged with his reputation enhanced from the confusion produced by Harold Macmillan’s sensational announcement. This was the Earl of Home. When he stood up to speak he was not regarded as a serious candidate. He told friends that he would offer ‘a week’s salmon-fishing on his Scottish estate’ to anyone who spotted even the whiff of a leadership bid hidden in his oratory. Be that as it may, within weeks Alec Home was being called to the Palace to kiss hands with the Queen.
This coming week the Conservative party returns to Blackpool. Once again the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens — more normally a showcase for smutty entertainers — will host a Conservative beauty contest. It is tempting to recall the remark made by Karl Marx about the French uprising of 1848, and muse that history is repeating itself as farce. There are certainly grounds for such an assertion.
Forty-two years ago the Conservatives were the party of government. They were in Blackpool to seek renewal after 12 years in power and three successive election victories. The party had a massive presence in Scotland, Wales, the north of England and the inner cities. It was part of the warp and woof of the nation. The majority of women were Conservative. The party was the most successful election fighting machine in the Western world, and knew it. The winner of that contest in Blackpool in 1963 would automatically become prime minister.
Almost the only thing that remains the same this time is Blackpool itself: the rain driving in off the North Sea, the abominable restaurants, and the air of being trapped on the set of a 1950s horror film directed by someone who has been very much influenced by French surrealism. There may have been a moment when Blackpool appeared contemporary. Now it merely seems a near perfect metaphor for the Conservative party. The Empress Ballroom, where Quintin Hogg lost his chance and the Earl of Home furtively launched his deadly strike, is still there, dingier than ever and even more fantastically atmospheric. This time, however, large parts of the hall will be cordoned off to create the illusion of a healthy attendance. The Conservative party is dying and next week’s conference is not really about the next leader: it is about how to head off extinction.
All the candidates are down to speak. Malcolm Rifkind is first up, on the Monday morning. David Cameron and Ken Clarke’s interventions come on Tuesday; David Davis and Liam Fox will be heard on Wednesday. Michael Howard’s leadership speech next Thursday morning will be a curious business. Alastair Campbell’s brutal description of Howard’s lingering presence since his ill-judged resignation on 6 May — ‘forgotten, but not gone’ — contains a melancholy truth. The Tory leader will announce his retirement again next week, though his successor is unlikely finally to emerge until Christmas. Who, or what, will lead the Conservative party in the interim is a matter of pure speculation. Francis Maude, the party chairman, is doing his best. Thanks to Tuesday’s defeat for the leadership, he will be remembered only as the most short-lived and hallucinatory chairmen of the Conservative party in modern history. Others are to blame as well.
Reputations can be destroyed or, for that matter, salvaged in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. None of the candidates will be more aware of this than David Davis, who this weekend checks into the Imperial Hotel as the undisputed front-runner. He has run a quiet, considered campaign over the summer. His success is emphatically not down to oratory, flair or vision. David Davis is a triumph of machine politics. Though his support is drawn quite widely, his campaign has its origins in the Conservative whips’ office of the early 1990s, when the Maastricht Bill was being driven through the House of Commons. It was a difficult task and David Davis carried it out supremely well. Davis’s style of cheery, boastful menace was well suited to his role, and it was during this period that he earned the admiration of the political diarist Alan Clark, who invited him to Saltwood Castle on 6 January 1991. (‘First dinner of the year. David Davis and his wife. Good strong chap, very much our sense of humour. Did the “black” route without turning a hair, then retraced his footsteps, hands in pockets — first time that’s ever been done.’)
Davis formed his political identity during this period. The whips who worked with him then — a tribute to the loyalty he is sometimes capable of inspiring — are with him still: Andrew Mitchell, Greg Knight, Derek Conway. It is widely imagined that in the likely event of Davis winning the leadership, Mitchell will be rewarded with the party chairmanship and, more troublingly, Conway will become chief whip.
It is worth pondering this prospect as the Davis machine very successfully adapts the techniques of that Maastricht whips’ office to the struggle for the Tory leadership. Conway has some of the qualities of a great chief whip, among them physical presence, an absence of illusions about human nature, an element of menace and a formidable attention to detail. I am told that the Davis camp calculates that well over 75 Conservative MPs have pledged themselves to Davis. Those figures will have been checked, checked again and checked again. Conway’s insistence that his candidate is well ahead among Conservative MPs carries real credibility.
The Maastricht whips’ office enjoyed a never understated aura of physical intimidation, and that has not gone away. Almost any method that came to hand — bribery, intimidation, though rarely charm — was brought to bear. I understand that, very much to his credit, David Davis has made no job offers of any kind — not even to David Willetts, the jewel in his crown — as he has battered and bruised his way to supremacy over the summer. Nevertheless some Tory MPs have indeed come away from Derek Conway with the impression, never directly stated, that it would be very much better for their interests if they came across to the Davis camp. Quite a numb er have done precisely that, and gone rushing to the aid of the man they judge to be the victor.
There is a worry here. Whips’ office skills may be very well adapted to winning Conservative party elections, but they are ill-suited to attracting the electorate. Whips lack sentiment. They prey on human weakness. Like the great historian Sir Lewis Namier, they despise ideas. They think that base and venal motives lurk behind politicians’ high ideals and fine phrases. Very often, of course, they are quite right.
But none of this is of use to the great political leader contemplating the highest office. His job is to exalt and never to cast down, to show vision and to bring his fellow citizens right out of themselves. Tony Blair, as he demonstrated yet again during his leader’s speech on Tuesday afternoon, is capable of carrying this off supremely well.
Nothing about David Davis’s campaign, for all his technical competence, suggests that he could emulate the Prime Minister’s dazzling rhetoric on Tuesday, or even Gordon Brown’s more solid prose the day before. The Davis machine has pursued its objective relentlessly, taking no risks. At no point has David Davis given a convincing account of what he would be like as national leader or, for that matter, why he wants the job. If he possesses a personal vision, thus far he has kept it secret. He launched his campaign last week with a despairing and utterly meaningless slogan: ‘Modern Conservatism’. (Tragic to record, his rival Liam Fox has made copious use of the identical phrase.)
Next week’s Blackpool conference comes at the end of an untidy period. The Conservative party has been in a vacuum for five months, and looks doomed to remain leaderless for some time to come. Blackpool ’05 is a Lilliputian affair, and open to mockery. Some of the people who have tilted at the leadership have been empty, absurd figures. But it is well worth remembering, as the representatives make the long, unreliable journey to the windy north-west, that the Conservative party is a great political party with a famous history. More than any other institution, it has formed the Britain we live in today, almost always for the better. It has some wonderful achievements to its name. It was William Wilberforce, a high Tory, who secured the abolition of slavery, not Labour, as the Chancellor deceitfully suggested on Monday.
One overwhelming task faces the Conservative party next week, which is even more important than the essential matter of the leadership: it must achieve poise and identity. It needs to regain its pride in itself and its sense of purpose. It is quite conceivable that the next Conservative party leader will end up in Downing Street — but only if next week in Blackpool goes well.
Despite appearances, David Davis has not quite won. He badly needs to show that he is more than an unusually plausible product of the whips’ office, and capable of becoming a national leader. Next week will be a dangerous time in the Winter Gardens. Any of the candidates could shine and any fail. It is rather important that one should shine. The Conservative party needs to reshape its own destiny and, by doing so, reconnect once more to the destiny of Britain.
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