Basic Problems for Britain's Tories

...Right-wingers in Parliament refused to concede that the government should distance itself from standards of personal morality...

...London newspapers, hunting for further scandals, erupted into a feeding frenzy...

...Or the problem may simply be the glaring absence of dynamic, trustworthy leaders capable of instilling a devotion to "basics"on the one hand, and a sense of purpose in changing times on the other...

...The errant minister was forced to resign, but the fuss had hardly subsided when the wife of a second Conservative MP announced that her husband had slept in the same bed with a man during a vacation...

...The conservative London Daily Telegraph—sometimes called the "Torygraph"—has called the Tory leadership "for the most part a sorry lot...

...Whether he stays or goes, the party will remain in crisis until the next national elections at the minimum...

...Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley observed that politicians "have gone into politics, not into the Church...

...Its tactics were unsuccessfully aped by Bush's spin-doctors later that year...

...Still sharper attacks have come from the mass-circulation Sun, whose disparaging misrepresentation of Labor policies and plans helped bring about the Conservative victory in the April 1992 general election...

...Never before in recent times has the British press been so unanimous in its judgment that a radical change in government is necessary...

...It may be that the country has yet to adjust to becoming a middle-ranking European entity after centuries of imperial dominance...

...In Whitehall rumors spread that Michael Portillo, the articulate Right-wing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was ready to challenge Major for leadership of the party and thus for the prime ministership...

...and in Parliament, unlike in the United States Congress, such a defeat can be calamitous for the party in power...

...The royal family, traditionally a symbol of national pride and identity as well as an instrument of continuity above partisan politics, has been seriously discredited by a highly public parade of scandals and spats...

...If, as polls predict, the local government elections in May prove to be a disaster for the Conservatives, Major may find himself under pressure to make way by the summer...

...This finding now appears to have been confirmed by figures the British Treasury has released...

...That a government will make mistakes, and that some of its foremost figures will be found wanting, is to be expected...

...Indeed, people began to ask why the Tories seemed to be intent upon a Great Leap Backward instead of proposing a new direction, a vision of the future...

...In fact, Major's explanation was unsatisfactory even to his own colleagues...

...Beleaguered government spokesmen, however, did not even try to justify the incident...

...An angry clash broke out between Left-wingers and Right-wingers in the Cabinet, and between the Prime Minister and the Right-wingers...

...That affair has yet to be investigated...

...Some Tories, from across the spectrum, believe it would be better to call for new elections right away...

...Two Left-wingers, Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke and Board of Trade President Michael Heseltine, are also now thought to be in the running...

...In the past, Labor-run councils have also been implicated in outrageous expenditure scandals—but Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition was not carrying the burden of an increasingly ridiculed "back to basics" slogan...

...A recent Sun story, headlined "What Fools We All Were to Believe This Lot," accused the party of corruption, immorality, deceit, and incompetence...

...In particular, Yeo had made a mockery of the party's "family values" platform, with its focus on reducing state-subsidized single motherhood...

...The campaign, it was said, aimed to tackle fundamental social problems, like the growing crime rate and sagging educational standards...

...The Church of England has seen a constant decline in its following, and was hardly helped by the retiring Bishop of Durham's admission—just before Christmas, no less—that he believes the Gospels' accounts of the nativity and resurrection of Christ are merely colorful fables...

...The damage appeared to become irreparable when an impartial auditor charged that London's Conservative Westminster City Council, the most prominent local government body in the country, had spent more than $30 million of public money gerrymandering the district because it was heading for a Labor Party victory in the next local election...

...Nevertheless, it left many people wondering exactly what "back to basics" was all about...

...Norman Gelb reports regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Something has plainly gone very wrong in Britain...

...Cynicism is rampant...

...Despite signs of a nascent economic recovery here, Prime Minister John Major's government was already widely seen as ineffectual when it was revealed in early January that Timothy Yeo, a married junior environment minister, had fathered a child by another woman...

...No one could help noticing that his behavior was in conflict with the "back to basics" campaign —generally understood as a call for a return to basic morality—that Major had launched just last October at the annual Tory conference in Blackpool...

...it may eventually come to a trial...

...He pointed out that Ronald Reagan never saw fit to spell out his vision of America as "a shining city on a hill," and George Bush knew better than to go into detail about America's "thousand points of light," although nobody really grasped what either phrase signified...

...Alexander Chancellor of the London Independent, having recently returned to England after a stint at the New Yorker, said it was clear to him the government was in trouble when it started trying to explain what "back to basics" meant...

...Before 10 Downing Street could offer a clarification, another embarrassing disclosure hit the headlines: A millionaire Tory parliamentarian had given money to a pensioner to buy, on his behalf, a desirable municipally-owned house in Central London that had been designated for a low-income purchaser...

...One columnist in London's Independent on Sunday moaned, "We have always been a grey land, but once we believed in something...

...Even if Labor wins, they argue, a spell in the Opposition would allow them to recover from their present humiliating position...

...Ministers were then dispatched to television studios and other news venues to explain that, while wrongdoers deserve to be punished, "back to basics" should not be interpreted as an intrusion into the personal choices of individuals...

...But then the country learned that the wife of junior transport minister Lord Caithness had committed suicide—and her mother said she took her life because of her husband's infidelity...

...Perhaps spurred by that accusation, Major assembled his Cabinet to pin down and define the elusive philosophy the Conservatives had stuck themselves with...

...Americans," wrote Chancellor, "seem to have found both these slogans uplifting?largely, I expect, because they are incomprehensible...

...Their critics answered that the current leaders simply had no such vision...

...Although a change in the party's leadership appears inevitable, and may occur shortly, redeeming its damaged reputation is unlikely to be achieved so easily...

...The British Civil Service, once held up as the model of efficiency and dedication, is increasingly the butt of jokes...

...Its fragile majority in the House of Commons leaves it vulnerable to defeat on critical issues...

...The Tory Council was in effect accused of scheming to fix the vote...

...The authority of the British police, too, has been undermined by revelations of corruption and incompetence...

...The government, of course, strove to distance itself from the personal peccadilloes of individual Tories...

...To top it all, a London Times study concluded that people in Britain were taxed less heavily by the last Labor government than they will be in 1994 under the Tories —who kept power by portraying Labor as the party of high taxation...

...He denied the suggestion of homosexuality, and the scandal was kept to a minimum...

...The collapse of the Tory reputation is only the latest in a series of developments here that have eroded respect for the nation's basic institutions...

...But the mishaps and disgraces plaguing the Tories since the turn of the year bring to mind the relentless doom-laden wailings of the chorus in a Greek tragedy...

...UNDERMINED BY SCANDAL Basic Problems for Britain's Tories BY NORMAN GELB THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY, Great Britain's dominant political force throughout most of this century, is in a state of shock from which it will not soon recover...