Thursday 13 May 2010
The political earthquake in the rose garden
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Thursday 13 May 2010 |
by Matthew Parris
Ice cores drilled from glaciers thousands of years old reveal short interludes of intense climatic change. It is just possible that, 50 years hence, cores drilled through the evolution of the British democratic mind since the Great Reform Bill of the 19th century may reveal that a comparable moment can be pinpointed to mid-May, 2010.
Call me hysterical, but I was conscious yesterday of something approaching a philosophical spasm. Hardly a breeze stirred the fresh green of the spring foliage on the trees behind the lecterns in the Downing Street rose garden as a new Prime Minister and a new Deputy Prime Minister, each from a different party, took their press conference; but there was a kind of violence in the air. The violence was not between them, but between them and our traditionally adversarial party politics. In their very concord lay the violence.
It was like witnessing a coup. Millions of viewers will have shared my impression almost of watching two men staging a putsch against their own parties, against the entire British political system, and against the ingrained assumptions of more than a century of parliamentary government. "Think again," said the moment.
All over Britain a very large number of people, I suspect, were thinking again. Were all my old colleagues in the Parliamentary Tory party thinking again? That's harder to answer. The new boys and girls will just be grateful to David Cameron for getting them there. But there are some old dogs for whom coalition is too new a trick, and some whose belief in adversarial politics is deep-rooted, intelligent and sincere. There will be a handful who distrust Mr Cameron ideologically and balk at the compromises coalition will bring. But as a former member of that Tory tribe I'd guess only a few will be immune to the spirit in which the two leaders spoke yesterday.
How often has it happened in our lifetimes that, as politicians spoke, so many attitudes began to shift? I could feel my own conservative political philosophy creak and bend under the weight of the moment. Listening to Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg talking to the assembled ranks of the news media -and through them to the nation-I could almost hear the rumble, crack and shudder of a conceptual earthquake stirring beneath us.
Any columnist writing in this vein must be acutely conscious of how preposterously his column may read in a few years' time-perhaps a few months' time. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight we shall then see how fine words about co-operation in the national interest soon came to nothing; how undertakings were betrayed; how events unforeseen smashed the consensus; how normal hostilities were resumed; and how our politics returned to its old path.
Probably I'll smile sadly at my naive enthusiasm. Maybe we shall cackle as broadcasters replay the sweet nothings that Nick and David murmured yesterday to each other, and contrast their flirty grins yesterday with the bitter wranglings to which both men and their respective party armies were to return tomorrow, once their coalition was tested in office. "It was always inevitable," we shall perhaps say, that these high hopes would soon be dashed.
It is equally possible-perhaps likeliest of all-that the high noon of adversarial politics in Britain really did begin to pass this week; that a steady shift towards consensual politics, European-style, began; that a changed voting system and an end to two-party politics became certain; and that the result will not in the end please us. If so we may view these May days with regret: the beginning of a slide into a cosy, boring and safety-first style of government; the end of the clash of beliefs or the possibility of decisive political command.
But perhaps a writer, even a political writer, should trust his instincts. Mine were that something important and good was happening. The ideas and feelings that Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron were radiating seemed to me to resonate with the hour, making me feel that my own were perhaps wrong, and were anyway passing from fashion. I felt as I watched them- their expressions, their astonishingly confident body language, the ease with which the right language came to both, the way two leaders could feel so obviously relaxed at so potentially tense a time-that the wind of their times was in their sails. Something stale was being blown away.
No divinity could have delivered either leader a better hand. Fate has conspired to give both men exactly what they need to achieve their ambitions for Britain and British politics.
If Mr Cameron and his party had done better last Thursday, they might have emerged with a small overall majority, just as John Major did in 1992. Whereupon the Tory legislative programme would have been placed at the mercy of a dozen or less of the party's ideological irreconcilables. If Mr Cameron had done worse last Thursday, his own leadership might have been under threat; and his philosophy of modern Conservatism would have been wounded, perhaps fatally, by the result.
If Mr Clegg had done as well as the polls had seemed to promise, he would have been in the position to form a stable coalition with Labour. He would have resisted this, but perhaps split his party in the attempt. The Lib-Lab coalition would anyway have been ill-starred from the start.
But Mr Cameron did well enough to keep command, but not well enough to take office without bringing another party into government. There are no other circumstances in which he could have sold coalition to his own ranks. And Mr Clegg did badly enough to be unable to offer Labour the Lib Dem troops they needed. There are no other circumstances in which he could have sold a Lib-Con coalition to many of his own party.
It borders on the supernatural. No imaginable electoral outcome could have more intelligently designed for the shape and tone of the government these two men already wanted to lead; no outcome could more securely have protected them from enemies within their own ranks.
Asked whether he had any religious belief, our new Prime Minister once replied that his faith was "a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes". If so, Mr Cameron should this weekend be experiencing a massive surge in signal strength.
Asked the same question, Mr Clegg replied that he had no belief in a god at all. Nor do I. But as constituency results came in on Friday, it emerged that the Great Returning Officer in the sky had given the Liberal Democrat leader the opposite of what he wanted, but exactly what on Sunday and Monday he would need. If God does not exist then-in light of the hidden hand that events have placed on the shoulders of these two new leaders, paving their way and staying their enemies-Nick Clegg and David Cameron may this weekend think it necessary to invent Him.
As they spoke there was, for me, a palpable lifting of the ghastliness of the past few years. Maybe Mr Cameron was right: it doesn't have to be this way. No outcome could have protected them more from enemies