Bloody Panico! Or, Whatever Happened to the Tory Party? by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The secret of our Prime Ministers is that they are weak. We give them an impossible job and sack them when they fail to perform it. Their inescapable function is to take the blame.
The word “secret” was used in the opening sentence because it suits all concerned to pretend the PM is powerful. He or she hopes, maybe even believes, that on reaching the top of the greasy pole, he or she will be able to do great things.
Those of us who are commentators rather than contestants wish to believe this too. We insist that it really matters who wins. Otherwise we are wasting our and our readers’ time.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft upholds with enthusiasm the ancient tradition of blaming the PM. In 2007 he brought out a volume entitled Yo Blair!: Tony Blair’s Disastrous Premiership.
In this new volume Wheatcroft condemns Boris Johnson as “an unprincipled mountebank” who “never genuinely believed anything apart from self-advancement and self-gratification”.
He observes that when Johnson took office in the summer of 2019, “There ensued six of the most dramatic and the most shameful months in British political history.”
“Most shameful” is putting it strongly, but not too strongly for Johnson’s critics. There is always a temptation to regard the defects of the present day as worse than the defects of the past, which have been softened by the passage of time.
But another of Wheatcroft’s characteristics is his love of the past. Anything which happens in the present day reminds him of some perceptive remark by Bismarck, A.J.P.Taylor or, in the case of the title of this book, Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles (1914-2013), who after a gallant naval career became a Conservative MP, and on one occasion barked at some restive Tory backbenchers: “Pro bono publico, no bloody panico.”
Because he is a lover of political history, Wheatcroft sees at once the similarities between Johnson and Disraeli, and indeed between Johnson and Lloyd George.
Both comparisons are enlightening. Wheatcroft makes the curious mistake of writing that Disraeli “entered Parliament as a Radical”. In reality, having stood in vain three times as a Radical, Disraeli joined the Tories, failed once for them at a by-election in 1835 but at the general election of 1837 was returned as the second of the two Tory members for Maidstone.
But it is true, as Wheatcroft says, that both Disraeli and Johnson were gifted outsiders, both of them exaggerated their eccentricities, and both were accused of unscrupulous behaviour.
On page 10 of his book, Wheatcroft abruptly declares, after discussing various episodes in both men’s careers, “there the comparisons end”. He justifies this by saying that, in the words of Lord Randolph Churchill, Disraeli’s career ended in “ultimate and complete triumph”, while Johnson’s “ended in ultimate and complete failure”.
One difficulty with this is that Johnson’s career may not, in fact, be over. If the Conservatives suffer, as the polls suggest, a heavy defeat on 4th July, and Nigel Farage mounts an opportunistic takeover bid, Johnson intends, as I reported a few days ago on ConHome, to run again for the leadership.
The more serious difficulty is that even the greatest leaders of the past had grave flaws. Wheatcroft the historian would at once admit this, and does so from time to time in the slim volume under review. He has indeed written a whole book about Winston Churchill’s flaws.
But Wheatcroft the polemicist yearns to condemn with especial vehemence whoever has just made a hash of things, i.e. Johnson, and to make bold but imprudent assertions about the future.
In 2005 he published a book called The Strange Death of Tory England, in which he remarked that the old governing class had lost its nerve after 1964, being unable in 1965 to put up a White’s Club candidate for the Tory leadership.
He lamented the “ruthlessness” of the class war waged by Margaret Thatcher against the Old Etonian wets, and Thatcherism’s “destructive contempt for traditional institutions and conventions”.
Yet at the end of the year the book came out, David Cameron, an Old Etonian member of White’s, was elected leader of the Conservatives, and in 2010 they once more took office.
Wheatcroft the historian reminds us that the Conservatives recovered much sooner than had been expected from crushing defeats in 1906 and 1945. Wheatcroft the polemicist is given to writing:
“Part of the problem has been the undoubted degeneration of the party in terms of personnel. It would be sentimental to suppose that all Tory politicians of the past had been exemplary characters, but the party does recently seem to have attracted more than its fair share of scoundrels, cheats and sexual eccentrics.”
What, one wonders, would Wheatcroft have written about the Profumo affair? This broke in 1963, as Harold Macmillan stumbled towards the end of his prime ministership, and one can, as it happens, turn to Wheatcroft’s earlier volume, The Strange Death, to find out what he made of it:
“What became known as the Profumo affair began to break after a shooting incident and a court case brought to light the lurid doings of Stephen Ward, an osteopath and part-time procurer (and the son of a clergyman), and two demi-mondaines he had enlisted, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Profumo had had a liaison with Keeler, who was, as it happened, sharing her favours with a Russian military attaché…
“The affair knocked more of the stuffing out of Macmillan: at the end of June there was an opposition motion on the largely spurious question of security, with the Prime Minister mumbling that ‘I acted honourably’, and coming close to tears when nearly 30 Tory MPs abstained.”
The press made hay, and in October 1963, when Macmillan supposed himself to be seriously ill and threw in the towel, the party turned to the morally irreproachable Lord Home to replace him.
In other words, the Conservatives reacted to public opinion, strove to provide the different kind of leadership which was said to be required, but then found their new leader mocked as an hereditary aristocrat who was presumed to be out of touch with ordinary people.
So too after the Partygate scandal the Conservatives strove, following the Truss interlude, to provide the competent, respectable leadership which seemed to be demanded, but found their new leader mocked as a plutocrat who was presumed to be out of touch with ordinary people.
One of the merits of Wheatcroft’s new volume, which recycles many of the best phrases from The Strange Death, is that it makes one try to work out where he goes wrong.
Our constitution worked: the PM became unpopular, so he was thrown overboard and replaced by someone else, who in turn may be replaced by the Labour leader. Wheatcroft in his fury at Johnson’s behaviour often overlooks the adaptability of our arrangements.
When Home was found wanting, the nation turned, by the narrowest of margins, to Harold Wilson, who immediately decided to defend the then value of the pound, and to manage his way out of trouble with a National Plan.
Sixty years later, the nation may turn to Sir Keir Starmer, who may also seek to manage his way out of trouble.
Wilson lasted until 1970, when the nation turned to the Conservatives under Edward Heath, whom they had chosen as their answer to the supposedly classless Wilson.
History never repeats itself exactly, and according to the opinion polls the defeat this time will be much heavier, but there is no reason to suppose that the Conservative Party is about to die.
Wheatcroft in 2005 concluded that the Tory Party seemed to have lost its “ferocious survival instinct and…endless capacity for re-invention”.
This time he wonders whether his earlier book was “premature rather than entirely wrong”, and posits that the Tories may be suffering from “long Boris”, a condition comparable to “long Covid”.
In the midst of life we are in death. One day Wheatcroft will be vindicated, and the Tories will be no more. He was right in chapter three of his earlier volume to draw attention to the decline of the gentlemanly ideal, which within living memory still integrated the rising middle class into the old governing class.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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