THE 18 October 1975 The international Catholic weekly 25p
TABLET Sakharov, a Soviet dissident: Vera Rich AUTUMN BOOKS: Bunyan’s progress •Max and Will •Morris working •Raine unknown • Lib letters from Portugal •Lawrence-woman • Powell’s time music •Naipaul’s guerrillas * Golda Meir’s life •Existential psychology •
An agenda for the Tory Party
The first thing that needs to be said about party conferences—if only as a warning to ourselves against falling into the very error we have detected in others—is that the press habitually endow these occasions with a significance that is rarely justified by the long-term effects of anything that occurs at them. Inevitably if the fiction of the Great Occasion is not to be wholly exposed, what does occur at them has to be blown up out of all proportion to its true political importance, for the nation or even the party concerned. The extravagant accounts of supposed rifts and equally supposed reconciliations, of revolutionary movements initiated in hotel bedrooms, of mildly provocative utterances that can be counted on to end in “uproar”—none of this distorts anything whose distortion counts for very much. It would, on the other hand, be a far more serious distortion were it to be suggested that even the formal declarations of political intent that emerge on these occasions are likely significantly to affect the future direction of a party’s policies or, more particularly, the course of the nation’s business. The fact is that a party conference is mainly a public relations exercise—a ritual dialogue between the party hierarchy and the faithful. Except to the extent that ideas are exchanged, the results have very little to do with the business of government—or of opposition for that matter. Moreover, the ideas that are exchanged tend to promote stability of outlook rather than provide a basis for change.
In his newly published memoirs, The Door Wherein I Went, Lord Hailsham explains: “Party activists tend always to be more jealous for party faith and party orthodoxy than those who are responsible for policy in government”—or, of course, in opposition. Those who are responsible for policy are, by contrast, “always apt to be more responsive to the pressure of [public] events . . . than are the party faithful,” for whose benefit, primarily, party conferences are of course put on. Lord Hailsham also believes that it is “when the party”—he was speaking specifically of his own party—“when the party is unpopular, or beaten [that] it tends to become more extreme and dogmatic,” whereas “ the real lesson to be learned” from such situations is often that it is “greater moderation” that is called for.
These views, expressed by a leading politician, and one who has reflected deeply on what he is about, seem to have a particular relevance to this year’s Conservative Party conference. In the main, the official speakers on that occasion appealed to “party faith and party orthodoxy,” with declarations of what Conservatism stands for that were couched in terms rather too broad and generalised to be in any real sense a response to “ the pressure of public events.” Indeed it seems that all such responses were deliberately avoided. Even on the policies being implemented by the government against such familiar tenets of Conservative orthodoxy as private enterprise and individual freedom, the attack mounted by the spokesmen of the only possible alternative administration (Mrs Thatcher excepted) must have seemed to many people—themselves politically uncommitted but nevertheless deeply concerned about the ever-tightening grip of state intervention and state control—to be far more effective in denouncing the excesses of the left than in explaining how a future Conservative government would operate the mixed economy
