The Major Spectator/Bennited Tories
Reid, Stuart
Bennited Tories by Stuart Reid London 6 6 lB ow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout / Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!" Or, as...
...He is the government's front man, the chap who will appear on TV and at rallies of the party faithful and maybe win Major the next election...
...At the press conference to announce that he would stand in the leadership election, he allowed himself to be surrounded by the sort of Thatcherites who probably embarrass even Lady Thatcher: anti-European zealots who wear loud clothes and can spot a conspiracy at fifty paces...
...Major called the July 4 leadership election to silence the carping from the far right, which had become intolerable...
...Baroness Thatcher will have no part to play in the millennium...
...He was determined, however, and ruthless...
...In the event, that's exactly what he has ended up doing, more or less...
...He was dismissed from the Cabinet (he had been Welsh secretary) in the reshuffle that followed the election...
...The Tory newspapers, scenting blood, launched another hate campaign...
...Yet nothing will stop the myth of betrayal...
...John Major's triumph in the Conservative Party leadership election ended their dream of bringing the Gingrich revolution to Britain, at least for the time being...
...You could have fed half Rwanda for a month with the egg from the Redwoodsmen's faces...
...It was Heseltine who, by standing against Mrs...
...If he tries to cut spending, he will outrage the military establishment...
...In the Authorized Mythology he is the Assassin...
...He called for an immediate reduction in taxes (to be financed by unspecified spending cuts), a reprieve for the royal yacht (which is due to be scrapped in 1997), and a morality check on all future Cabinet ministers (uh-oh...
...It was all so patronizing, self-serving, self-pitying, and there was a hint of panic in it...
...Still, he is only 44 and no doubt has other things to look forward to...
...The American Spectator September 1995 He once told a friend, "I want to become PM, but I never will be because my name is Portillo...
...She chided Major for not being conservative enough and for allowing his administration to "hit at everything I believed in," and suggested that he was responsible for the cooling of the Anglo-American alliance (by helping the Republicans in 1992...
...Portillo, 41, is the son of a Castilian refugee from Franco's Spain, and fairly typical of Thatcher's courtiers...
...A Thatcherite clique has been gunning for the Prime Minister ever since he replaced the Iron Lady in November 1990...
...The Thatcherites are banging the drum for Labour's Tony Blair, even though he is pro-Europeand his brand of centrism is clearly to the left of Major's...
...No one has ever lost friends, or influence, by sneering at Major or by putting on an exaggeratedly refined Cockney to mimic his South London accent...
...It was time for his opponents to put up or shut up...
...But the market for xenophobia is not what it was...
...At Cambridge in the 1970s he abandoned his youthful socialism for claret and conservatism...
...Since the Thatcherite right hates Europe above all else, and is not very fond of moderation, it hates the new cabinet...
...Still, without Porteeo Major's new cabinet would be almost entirely Europhile, not to say moderate...
...It is not possible to exaggerate the mood of bitter frustration and impotent fury among Thatcherites here...
...M ichael Portillo, who until Redwood stepped forward was the darling of the right, has now lost his place as Thatcher's natural successor...
...It soon became de rigueur on the right, and in aspiring metropolitan circles, to mock Major for his lower middle-class origins and his failure to graduate from high school...
...The bitter divisions between the center-right majority in the Tory party (represented Stuart Reid is assistant features editor at the London Sunday Telegraph...
...T he Tories have now entered the Twilight Zone...
...The Defeatists hope that Major will lose the next election, and be replaced by a Thatcherite, who will lead the Tories to victory in the following election...
...By June 22 he had had enough...
...He also promised not to abolish the pound—in response to the Thatcherite demand that Britain should not join a single European currency—and made clear his support for capital punishment (even though he knows the Commons would not vote for the rope this side of a general insurrection, and probably not even then...
...W ithin months of her departure from Downing Street, Thatcher began poisoning the wells with those little vials of spite she keeps in her handbag...
...More to the point, though, his agenda is in many respects Thatcherite...
...The chief fear of the right in opposing Major was that Heseltine might end up running the show...
...Our operators are on duty to help you Monday thru Friday, 8 :30 am until 11:30 pm, Eastern Standard Time...
...One observer spoke for everyone on the extreme center when he said: "If that greaseball wants xenophobia, we'll give him xenophobia...
...if he seeks to please the military establishment by increasing the defense budget, he may face charges of inconsistency: as a Thatcherite he has long been an advocate of spending cuts...
...One even suggested that Major, like Hitler fifty years ago, was cowering in his bunker dreaming of fresh victories...
...Hence the support in the shires for Blair...
...The prime minister's enemies delight in saying that Major takes the insults personally...
...He stands for nothing, he is nothing," she was reported to have told friends...
...The American Spectator September 1995 47...
...In the process of promoting the second volume of her memoirs at the beginning of June, Thatcher gave a series of interviews in which she savaged the prime minister...
...Others simply declared that the vote had not been democratic...
...He decided to play the British Is Best card...
...Nor was Redwood's manifesto anything to set the world alight, or even to produce a glow in darkest Essex...
...He has continued the program of privatization begun by his predecessor, and indeed taken it further than she ever dared...
...He called reporters to the Rose Garden at Downing Street and announced that he was resigning as leader of the Conservative Party...
...Thatcher in 1990, brought about her downfall...
...Oh dear...
...Major supporters are finding it difficult to contain their mirth...
...He has followed Thatcher's cautious line on Europe, but unlike Thatcher does not throw tantrums in Brussels...
...Or, as Lesley Gore put it some years after King Lear: "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to / Cry if I want to . . . / You would cry too if it happened to you...
...Paul Johnson, an ardent Thatcherite, has come out for the Labour leader, and Rupert Murdoch is courting him...
...Her legacy was being undermined, she said...
...The Revolutionary Defeatist Tendency is having a fine time...
...by the 218 votes for Major) and the Thatcherite minority (represented by the 89 for Redwood) remain in place...
...In an extraordinary speech in January 1994 he told a gathering of students that foreigners were cheats and liars...
...The Majorites would hardly be human if they did not feel a little Schadenfreude...
...Sorry, Johnny, said the malcontent MPs—the encyclopedia salesmen who were elected on his manifesto and the strength of his allegedly lackluster personality—sorry, sunshine, that's not bloody good enough...
...Put up or shut up, he told the Thatcherites...
...Even Thatcher has been saying how much she admires Blair...
...The Major-haters are making the same mistake as the supporters of the far-left Tony Beim who, in the seventies and eighties, insisted that the Labour Party needed to be more socialist if it was to win power...
...They may ultimately be cherished as lovable eccentrics, but their day is done...
...This is to misread the mood of the country...
...Theyare intended personally...
...He has continued to spend billions on welfare, and, like Thatcher, has failed to curb public spending...
...He is very brainy (he was a fellow of All Souls, Oxford), but perhaps not very smart...
...The Thatcherites demanded that the prime minister declare he would not "abolish the pound," to which he replied that he would keep his options open—as he had said when he went to the country in 1992...
...Soon people were pronouncing Portillo's name the Spanish way: "Por-TEE-o...
...Especially galling is the appointment of the charismatic, golden-locked Euro-enthusiast Michael Heseltine as deputy prime minister...
...In the debriefing sessions following their rout, the walking wounded juggled the figures to prove that they had won a moral victory...
...Well, of course he does...
...His distinguishing physical characteristics are a quiff and a smirk...
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...As Redwood and the "Barmy Army" posed grinning and sweating in front of the cameras, they looked like a bunch of NCOs in a Third World country who hadjust taken over the radio station and were not sure what to do next...
...Redwood, on the other hand, does not...
...Soon, no doubt, the more dedicated among them will head for the Scottish Highlands to dress up in combat fatigues and fool around with rocket-launchers...
...John Redwood, the Thatcherite challenger, had the support of almost the entire Tory press, and still he lost...
...The Thatcherites are going to end up as the Bennites of the Tory party...
...This fight is as much about personalities as it is about policies...
...It is only by moving to the right, the argument goes, that the Tory party can succeed...
...And then there is Bosnia, and maybe after that gays in the armed forces...
...They put up, but they have not, and will not, shut up...
...It is true that Major is a conciliator, a compromiser, even a George Bush figure (he raised taxes having promised not to), but he also has some qualities of Ronald Reagan: the decency, the goodwill, the down home patriotism, the ready smile...
...He remains in the cabinet, but has been moved from Employment to Defense, where he can do little mischief...
...Matters came to a head when he was heckled by anti-European backbenchers...
...For one thing Major has not lost the election yet, and for another the middle classes (who decide elections) have moved to the center...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
