The Tory Reform Group now has an excellent “shiny new blog” called Egremont, so if you’ve landed here from the old home page or by some other remarkable feat of internet legerdemain – since very few people ever have landed here it has to be admitted – then do go there straight after you’ve finished. And you won’t, sadly, need to come back, as this is the last post on the old blog. So forgive me a bit of old guard partisanship as I lay into Tim Montgomerie’s ludicrous caricature of our beloved president, Ken Clarke.
Montgomerie now uses two principal outlets for his brand of right-wing “mainstream” conservatism, the Conservative Home site and the Daily Mail (And how annoyed we should be that he’s nicked our very own former description from us!). While David Cameron is hardly a liked quantity on either of these platforms, for real pantomime villainy look no further than the genial, widely liked Justice Secretary, the Leader Who Never Was, and – despite his desire to release a load of prisoners and give those who remain inside the vote – still one of the most popular Tories in the country (yes, I know, we haven’t set the bar very high have we?). Today, the day on which Mr. Clarke, in another of his trade-marked outbursts of political honesty has announced that the middle classes don’t yet know what is to hit them and when they do, Coalition popularity may well be at what we term a premium, Mr. Montgomerie has used both of his outlets to make sure we know what a lethal, despicable figure the Justice Secretary is. According to the Mail’s under-stated headline, Clarke is a disloyal, pro-Europe old bruiser who should be given the boot. Remarkably for a Daily Mail headline, there are considerable accuracies within it. Even his best friends would never use the term Euro-sceptic to describe Clarke, although some might venture “Euro-pragmatic”. He is certainly an old bruiser too, who takes few enemies. But really, disloyal? The servant of four Tory prime ministers disloyal? If you want disloyalty, look no further than the intransigent euro-sceptics who see no virtue in supporting a party leadership that it will never agree with. I suspect Mr. Clarke’s voting record under Tory administrations compares very favourably with that of, say, Bill Cash, but would Mr. Montgmerie ever consider Mr. cash to be a “disloyal old bruiser”? Conservative Home at the moment positively revels in the disloyalty of a right-wing praetorian guard, standing over the eternal flame of Thatcherite purity, with all that that brings (a receding Tory vote, an absence in the cities and provinces, a heinously divided UK polity….).
The crux of Mr. Montgomerie’s boiling over frustration with Mr. Clarke is that he has been disloyal to three Tory leaders. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Montgomerie found he could probably live with the disloyalty to John Major and William Hague, but what the old-time Thatcherites – sorry, mainstream conservatives – will never forgive is his frank advice to Margaret Thatcher to go now as she was finished, in those fateful days in November 1990. Other people rather admire Mr. Clarke for his bluntness on that occasion, at a time when so many of his Cabinet colleagues were simply trooping in to tell the Lady that of course they would vote for her, and then weeping a little into the bargain. One Nation Tory though he was, he had been one of her more radical ministers, shaking up first health and then education in a way that lesser, even Thatcherite, men might have shrunk from doing in those harsh, divided times. But Clarke was no fantasist – he knew Thatcher was finished and was kind enough to break through the wall of political fiction that had been built around her in order to tell her so. Mr. Montgomerie paints this as a long-term plot, part of Mr. Clarke’s persistent manoeuvring to get rid of her. Hmmm. I remember those days, and my recollection is that Ken Clarke was more interested in heading down to Ronnie Scott’s or a Brick Lane curry house than doing anything so unseemly as plotting. The plotting was mainly conducted by the right anyway, who were far more numerous, or Machiavellian experts such as Tristan Garel-Jones. Mr. Montgomerie’s reading of recent political history is remarkably facile.
Clarke’s opposition to a referendum under John Major – Mr. Montgomerie’s second great accusation – was certainly to do with his general and always public support for the EU as it stood, but it was hardly a strategy designed to undermine a Prime Minister whom he actually liked and with whom he formed a strong working relationship. Mr. Major’s position was made far more difficult and malign by the actions of his euro-sceptic MPs, who thought nothing of trying to undermine support for the sitting Tory premier, and whose own disloyalty almost certainly contributed to the eventual Tory defeat in 1997.
As for Mr. Montgomerie’s third charge – that Mr. Clarke opposed William Hague’s “Keep the Pound” campaign – this was such a fatuously simplistic campaign that it had already failed to make any resonance with the British public.
Ken Clarke is one of the big figures of contemporary British politics, respected for his integrity and his general human-ness. That he maintains a fundamental loyalty to the idea of the European Union is of course the reason why he never became leader of his party, for he would never abandon deeply held beliefs. Certainly it also pits him against the current consensus of the Tory Party. But the British people seem rather less bothered by Europe than the narrow membership of the Tory Party, and Mr. Clarke’s broad political outlook, firmly rooted in the values of One Nation Conservatism, has always had more appeal than that of his more right-wing, authoritarian rivals. I rather doubt that the jovial Lord Chancellor will actually serve out the whole of this government, and when he goes he will be depriving the government of one of the few publically connected members they have. There are many things that make him a frustrating politician, but let us have no truck with the nonsense that he is some sort of treacherous, disloyal Mandelsonian who has single-handedly destroyed three Tory leaders. It is utter bilge, and Mr. Montgomerie should try filling his Daily Mail pages with more elevated material.
Meanwhile, it’s goodbye from this TRG blog, and over to Egremont!
