A Political Suicide: The Conservatives’ Voyage into the Wilderness by Norman Fowler
Methuen, £14.99
THIS is a profoundly important book which talks candidly about things going wrong in party and government and stands remote from partisan politics: Tribune readers should suspend any prejudices and read it. Norman Fowler was a pretty good minister at Transport, then Health, a supporter of Michael Heseltine and a friend of John Major. He takes us through the travails of the late Thatcher period and most of the Major government, adding an epilogue about Labour’s griefs; an old casualty talking to the new walking wounded.
There isn’t room for everything that went wrong, but here is a rich handful: Margaret Thatcher, asked an astute question by Tony Bevins about inequalities between private and public health, abandoned the available rational argument and proclaimed her glories: “The day I want, and with the doctor I want.” She flightily embraced David Young’s shabby intrusion as alternative campaign chairman in 1987 over the head of “my beloved Norman” (Tebbit). The clear unpopularity – among Conservatives – of the poll tax is noted in Fowler’s helpful diary: “Most of the party seem to be distancing themselves from the bill… not helped by the fact that half the cabinet have their reservations.”
Coming to the so-called Eurosceptics – Euro-dervishes would have been a better term – Fowler, a clear-eyed supporter with practical criticisms, recalls the 1985 Single European Act, much more radical than Maastricht or Lisbon, promoted and guillotined on Thatcher’s authority with Tebbit and Ridley onside. He points out the lady’s heavy operations beyond cabinet. “Cards were marked before a minister presenting the case had uttered a word… When Thatcher spoke of ‘her people’ too often they were the civil servants and her advisers.”
When Fowler, at 51, decided to leave that cabinet, unusually but usefully he stayed in Parliament, inevitably caught up in the politics of the leadership. His diary responds to Geoffrey Howe’s broken cricket bat speech: “The effect is devastating”. (I was in the gallery that day. It was). “Margaret is now really holed. She is not yet sunk but it is as nasty a position as I can remember.”
As for John Major’s time, Fowler performs the service most necessary to get-it-wrong-quick journalists. Back to Basics ignored sex. The renegotiation of Maastricht was successful even with the Murdoch press, re-cutting the European coat to fit British – and Tory – requirements. Put to Parliament instanter, it would have passed almost with acclamation. The mistake was a reasonable wish not to cram anything more into the short space before the 1993 elections.
We are told next of the hopelessly overdrawn, discombobulated nature of Conservative Central Office which, no more than Millbank Towers, understood neither prudence nor arithmetic. (In his conclusion, Fowler calls for a larger measure of state funding).
Major’s triumph was flawed only by the failure of the popular vote to be reflected in the number of seats he won at Westminster and when Maastricht came up again, that reduced majority, the hysterically conducted Danish referendum, a Commons reinforced with foaming phobes, plus Thatcher’s long distilled animus, all created a legislative Calvary. Also, something I certainly didn’t know, the pit closures, out of character and utterly wrong, were derived from Treasury insistence pushed through a small committee. Oh, yes, and Rupert Murdoch at a dinner party offered Major backing in return for Euroscepticism – and was refused.
Fowler’s nine concluding lessons are for practicing politicians who should all buy this little book for reading, marking and inward digestion. Incidentally, one of them is that the Iraq War, having been utterly wrong, the acts starting and selling it, should now be properly pursued.
Edward Pearce
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