HIGH SPIRITS: Behind the Tory Revival
Aitken, Jonathan
HIGH SPIRITS JONATHAN AITKEN A Political Miracle: Behind the Tory Revival A POLITICAL MIRACLE is transforming Britain's Conservative Party. Early last fall it was regarded as the most...
...Where will this trio end up when the music stops and the scene changes...
...As the polls are showing, he looks like a winner with the clout to beat Blair or Brown...
...If that happens, or if Blair has to emasculate the fees proposal to get it through, his authority could be devastatingly weakened...
...The chancellor of the exchequer has become a brooding, smoldering, would-be regicide in recent weeks, although he is careful to get his associates to do the dirty work of regime change planning and head counting for this purpose...
...So as Britain's political landscape starts to tremble with the coming vibrations of what will certainly be a major tremor and which might even turn out to be a quake at the higher end of the Richter scale, only Michael Howard looks like being a leader who, 18 months from now, will have a lot more Parliamentary seats behind him in the next House of Commons...
...His second was to unite his troops behind him in a succession of fiery debating victories over Tony Blair...
...Michael Howard has something of the night about him" was one cruel jibe which stuck along with other inconsequential pieces of political mud...
...His appearance is haggard...
...Seismic forecasts of this magnitude in the normally tranquil landscape of British politics are so extraordinary that the present volatile conditions deserve careful analysis...
...To assume power with no rival contenders, no deals and no divisive votes was his first achievement...
...Even to its few remaining loyalists, the rump of the Thatcherite army which held power for 18 years with four successive victories between 1979 and 1992 looked about as capable of entering into successful electoral combat against Blair as Napoleon's rabble on the retreat from Moscow...
...How long," asked the Conservative MP, "have you been chancellor or shadow chancellor...
...The fourth and greatest blessing for Howard was to have his entire political history and persona favorably reassessed by the media in an amazing spectacle of revisionism, itself a sign of the changing times...
...These days King Howard has something of the Midas about him as everything he touches turns to political gold...
...Their deadline is the approaching High Noon of the vote on top up fees...
...After the October coup by Tory backbenchers against his lackluster predecessor, Iain Duncan Smith, Howard did not merely hit the ground running, He steamrollered it so Jonathan Aitken, a former British MP and cabinet minister, is the author of seven books, including Nixon: A Life...
...as vital for the sensible funding of higher education...
...The failure to find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was a major manifestation of this problem, but it has been overtaken by the prime ministerial promises to cut hospital waiting lists or to raise educational standards in schools...
...The rumors were not entirely dismissible...
...But where Blair is really coming unstuck is on gut issues that upset middle class voters such as rising taxes, deteriorating public services, soaring immigration figures and increasingly intrusive regulations from the European Union...
...Even when announcing the joyful news of Saddam's surrender he looked as gaunt and pallid as a TB patient...
...Early last fall it was regarded as the most demoralized and divided official opposition in living memory...
...For even if Blair's troubles in medical terms are curable on the political front they are becoming critical...
...When Parliament broke up for its Christmas recess the rumor mill was at fever pitch with predictions of a prime ministerial resignation in the New Year on grounds of ill health...
...Its internecine feudings and leadership crises brought ridicule from Westminster's chattering classes and rejection from the voters...
...Whether Blair wins it in a Pyrrhic victory or loses it with a humiliating defeat, it is a good each-way bet that his party will press for a change of leadership into Brown's outstretched hands...
...Meanwhile Howard's cheerleaders enthuse optimistically, but not ridiculously, that their man is shaping up to achieve the 10.5 percent swing needed to win a shock victory over Labour at the General Election of 2005...
...At this writing, the reinvigorated Tories lead Labour in the opinion polls...
...His staunch support for the Bush administration's war on Iraq has been an ingredient in that unpopularity, particularly among disaffected Labourites...
...With the voters and within his own party Blair has reached the nadir of mid-term unpopularity...
...Blair's torment stems partly from ill health, partly from a widening credibility gap and partly from looming humiliations at the hands of his own party The secrets of the prime minister's health are known only to himself and his doctors, but the outward signs and portents look bad...
...Atlanticists are remembering that Howard has kept the faith as a strong Americanophile, as an unequivocal supporter of the war on Iraq, and as a discerning Euroskeptic...
...Michael Howard is starring as the new Tory Messiah...
...His ostensible No...
...Au Contraire Within his circle of friends Tories, Even With a New Leader (I have been one See Little to Hope For for over two From the New York Times, December 22, 2003 decades) Michael Howard has long been seen as an underappreciated political heavyweight of the highest professionalism and principle...
...After a few moments of struggling to get his demons under control he returned, still visibly upset, to the back of the Speaker's chair...
...But what a difference a hundred days can make in politics...
...Michael Howard FEBRUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41...
...It has suddenly been noticed that during his years as a tough Home Secretary crime actually fell by 18 percent...
...The perception of Blair's growing weakness is being assiduously fostered by his heir apparent, Gordon Brown...
...Blair also has a growing credibilityproblemwith many voters who have come to distrust his habit of promising and not delivering...
...He is having the happiest of political honeymoons...
...Yet so low is Brown's boiling point that his Prince Hal-like impatience to seize the crown sometimes explodes like an erratic geyser...
...Blair is reeling on the ropes, bruised by rebellions within his own party and battered by aflurry of Parliamentary pummeling,s at the hands of the agile new Leader of the Opposition, Michael Howard...
...In recent weeks, support for Blair has been hemorrhaging so badly that even the most sycophantic of liberal commentators concede that the prime minister is in serious trouble...
...That sure-fire prediction seemed so unthinkable before October that for once the hackneyed label "a political miracle" is appropriate to describe the Conservative Party's progress and prospects...
...A third was to show a faultless skill in appointing his shadow cabinet...
...Torment, betrayal and euphoria are three words that accurately capture the mood music accompanying the three leading men of Westminster as they make their exits and their entrances in this season's passion play of politics...
...If this is the mood of the prime minister's righthand man when talking to his opponents, the mind boggles in imagining Brown's darker conversations with his friends, particularly with those colleagues who are now openly involved in anti-Blair plotting...
...All are forgotten now...
...Above all, the voters now like Howard...
...Watching these unfolding dramas inside the Labour Party with glee is the opposition leader, Michael Howard...
...After Iraq, the hottest of these issues is the payment of "top up fees" for tuition by university students...
...Brown well knows that his best and possibly last chance of becoming prime minister will come in the aftermath of this issue being resolved...
...This genuinely polite inquiry so disturbed Brown that instead of replying with the factual answer (nine years) he stalked off down the corridor shaking with fury...
...2, Gordon Brown, is playing Judas...
...The greatest difficulty for Blair is that he is at bitter loggerheads with large sections of his own party on a number of issues which arouse the visceral hostility of New Labour's old left-wingers...
...Blair rightly regards these fees 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 JONATHAN AITKEN successfully that his victory was rightly described by the headline writers as a coronation...
...It's time for a change" growled Brown to his astonished interlocutor...
...But he was prematurely written off allegedly for being too insensitive a Home Secretary under John Major and for having too unappealing an image on television...
...For example, one day last fall a prominent Tory shadow minister was chatting amicably to Brown behind the Speaker's chair in the House of Commons...
...He has been hospitalized twice for heart problems requiring heavy medication...
...But over 100 Labour MPs say they will vote to inflict defeat on their leader in a House of Commons vote on the fees issue in late January...
...Tony Blair is the tormented one...
...Too long...
Vol. 37 • February 2004 • No. 1
