LONDON, 13 October 2003 — Addressing his party’s annual conference at the northern British seaside resort of Blackpool last week, the leader of Britain’s Conservative opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, evoked the kind of ecstatic response normally reserved for rock stars. Observers lost count of the number of standing ovations the Tory leader received even before he had finished his speech: Applauding furiously, the conference’s delegates sprang up and down like so many delirious jack-in-the-boxes. That proverbial figure, the visitor from another planet, would have concluded that the Iain Duncan Smith was a mighty figure, a politician of truly extraordinary charisma.
How wrong he would have been. The truth is that the rousing reception accorded to Duncan Smith was a put-up job, a stage-managed demonstration of party loyalty founded on desperation. Indeed, so far from being an object of mass veneration, Iain Duncan Smith may well be the least popular and least respected Tory leader of all time. Behind the scenes at Blackpool, the air was thick with whispering and plotting and rumors of a prospective leadership challenge. For it is becoming increasingly clear to the Tories that under Duncan Smith their party is doomed. Despite growing public distrust of the current British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Duncan Smith has proved woefully incapable of turning Blair’s difficulties to his party’s advantage. Opinion polling has revealed that some half of the British electorate simply do not know who he is. In other words, so far as 50 percent of Britons, both young and old, are concerned, he might as well not exist.
Duncan Smith’s conference speech was trumpeted as a make-or-break event for this bald-headed ex-soldier who has inherited the mantle of Margaret Thatcher as the champion of the British right, of xenophobic “little Englanders” who bitterly resent Britain’s membership of the European Union. Intent on routing his many critics, he opted for an exhibition of machismo, speaking not from the stage but from a podium in the middle of the conference hall, which he strutted about like some superannuated prize fighter engaged in a display of shadow boxing. As for the substance of his speech, it may have drawn loud, if synthetic, cheers from the party faithful, but his most memorable comments — his blunt allegation that Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is a liar and his insinuation that Charles Kennedy, the leader of Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, has a drink problem — were crude stuff designed to appeal to his party’s lowest tribal instincts.
Last year, Duncan Smith wound up his conference speech by dubbing himself the “quiet man of British politics,” a remark that was a gift to Britain’s mocking and cynical press. This year, betraying even greater lack of judgment, he brought his speech to a climax by announcing that the quiet man was about to “turn up the volume.” It is hard to believe that any Tory leader ever gave a more inept and embarrassing performance: Great Conservative leaders of the past such as Winston Churchill must have been wincing in their graves. Had he not been speaking to his own tribe, he might well have provoked howls of derision; though some might have felt a perverse sense of privilege in having been present at such a uniquely ghastly occasion. It is perhaps needless to add that few believe “IDS” stands any chance of ever appealing to the British public as a whole, let alone of emerging as a figure on the world stage.
At a time when Tony Blair faces mounting public criticism over his decision to go to war against Iraq, Duncan Smith finds himself preoccupied with his own survival. It is possible that there will be a challenge to his leadership in a matter of weeks and that the Tory Party will, once again, become locked in a bloody civil war. The trouble is that the election of the Tory Party leader now lies in the hands of the party’s constituency members, an increasingly elderly rump of right-wing Britons who would be unlikely to choose anybody with a wider electoral appeal than Duncan Smith himself. Mutinous Tory politicians anxious to get rid of their current leader are thus in a fix.
All this of course is excellent news for the embattled Tony Blair. It is excellent news, too, for the Liberal Democrats and Charles Kennedy. If the Tory slide continues in the next general election, the Liberals could be in a position to become the chief party of opposition. Indeed, it is no longer inconceivable that there could be a major reconfiguration of British politics, with New Labor occupying the role formerly occupied by the Tories and the Liberal Democrats representing the left of center. For British democracy, meanwhile, the implications are grim. Bereft of an opposition party worthy of the name, the country that has liked to regard itself as a “light unto the nations” has become for all practical purposes a one-party state. British politicians of all persuasions are forever speaking of their commitment to choice, but Britain more and more feels like a society that has been purged of choice altogether.
It is a question whether the Tories have much of a future save as a right-wing lunatic fringe. What was once the most effective election winning machine in the Western world is in danger of ending up as a marginalized sect. How could this be when throughout the 1980s and for much of the 1990s the Tory party dominated British politics, and when the Labour Party for many years looked as though it would never enjoy power again? It is largely because the Tory party led by Margaret Thatcher, and subsequently by her disciple, John Major, became the victim of its own success. Mrs. Thatcher was committed to transforming Britain into a country where the free market is the measure of all things. It was the mission of this rabid enemy of public provision, of everything that smacked to her of socialism, to alter the pattern of British life irreversibly. Even before she was forced out of office in 1990 it was widely accepted that she had presided over a far-reaching right-wing revolution in the country’s institutions, if not in its basic social attitudes and values. The success of Tony Blair was rooted in the recognition that what Mrs. Thatcher accomplished was indeed irreversible. By re-branding the Labour Party as “New Labour” and championing a style of politics that amounted to Thatcherism “with a human face”, Blair contrived to reduce Tories to electoral irrelevance. Britain today remains in many respects the country forged by Mrs. Thatcher, a place where the free market rules, where the gap between rich and poor gets bigger by the year, and where top footballers earn more in a week than most politicians earn in a year, simply because commerce puts a far greater value on their skills. Last week, Iain Duncan Smith was vying for media coverage with possibly delinquent football players who face rape allegations and with multimillionaire England footballers who were threatening to go on strike because they believed that one of their colleagues was being shabbily treated by the football authorities; the Tory leader was competing for the headlines, too, with a spate of gun crime that is sweeping Britain, and which may likewise be regarded as a product of Mrs. Thatcher’s malign legacy.
Many feel that Tony Blair’s government is helpless in the face of Britain’s burgeoning social ills. But there is also a widespread sense that it was the free market zealotry of Mrs. Thatcher and her fellow ideologues that spawned those ills in the first place. Little wonder if there is no longer much of a market for the party that staked its credibility on the beneficence of the market.
