Wednesday, February 18, 2015
By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail
Published: 18:08 GMT, 29 April 2012 | Updated: 06:55 GMT, 30 April 2012Anyone who has read his gripping books, or watched his accompanying TV series chronicling that disastrous decade The Seventies by my Mail colleague, the historian Dominic Sandbrook, and who is too young to remember the events themselves, may well wonder exactly how Mrs Thatcher arose like a Phoenix from the ashes to save her party and Britain from the catastrophe wrought by Edward Heath, arguably the worst Prime Minister of the 20th century - at least until the advent of Tony Blair.
The question is made all the more pressing and topical by the striking parallels between then and now. In 1974 the country was also on its knees economically. Racked by a sudden hike in oil prices caused by a Middle East War, Britain was on the floor and rapidly being counted out. The all-powerful Trade Unions turned the knife in our back by repeated stoppages, culminating in a Miners' strike to which Heath's Tory Government responded by turning the lights out and making everyone work a three day week.
When those drastic tactics failed, Heath called an election on the question 'Who runs Britain?' failing to realise that in doing so he had provided his own answer: 'Not you, matey!'
Grim decade: Racked by a sudden hike in oil prices, seventies Britain was on the floor and suffered from trade Union action, strikes and the three day weekDuly defeated at the polls, and more decisively in a second election later the same year, Heath, a monument to vanity and purblind arrogance, refused to draw the obvious conclusion that, having been rejected by the voters in three out of the four elections he had fought as Tory leader, it was time to give someone else a chance to succeed where he had so manifestly failed. Like some sort of large moulting bird, Heath stubbornly clung to his leadership perch.
Enter a Tory MP named Airey Neave. As an intelligence officer and successful Colditz escapee in World War Two, the heroic Neave had learned all there is to learn about intrigue, deception and the political Black Arts. His political career had stalled after a heart attack in the 1950s, and he became an implacable enemy of Heath, who, with typical insensitivity, had told him he was 'finished'. Instead, Neave became a backroom operator, a cool calculator, a whisperer in influential ears, and a stalwart of the Tory backbenchers' "Trade Union" the 1922 Committee, (named after the year when restive Conservative backbenchers brought down a Coalition with Lloyd George's Liberals - David Cameron: take note).
Example: Airey Neave, a former intelligence officer, was instrumental in securing a solid opposition to rise up against unpopular HeathIn vain Neave attempted to persuade fellow right-wingers Sir Keith Joseph, an intellectual newly converted to monetarism, and Edward Du Cann, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, to stand against Heath. But it was third time lucky when he asked Margaret Thatcher to become the standard bearer against Heath's surrender to socialism. When she told Heath of her decision to stand, with his habitual charm he grunted 'You'll lose'. But, as usual, Heath was wrong. As Thatcher's campaign manager Neave conducted the campaign with feline skill, telling waverers horrified by the idea of electing a woman, - and a woman of principle at that, - as Tory leader, that Thatcher had no chance of winning. But, Neave added craftily, it was important that she achieved enough votes to clear the decks for someone else to stand against 'Sailor Ted' in the second round. He persuaded or deceived enough doubters - just - to win.
When the votes were counted in February 1975 - a whole year after the election that ended his inglorious Premiership - Heath was out, with 119 votes; and Thatcher was in with 130. In vain did those Tories who had been too cowardly to stand against Heath first time round pile in for the second round - Thatcher won easily. Though she would have her problems with the Heathite Tory 'wets' throughout her leadership - and they would, in the end, bring her down - they were unable to prevent her decisively breaking with the disastrous big state, union appeasing, lame duck subsidising semi-socialism of the Heath era; winning three elections and putting Britain in a prouder, stronger and more prosperous place than she had found it.
Neave himself did not live to see his work reach its final fruition. He was murdered by an Irish terrorist bomb before Thatcher's triumphant election in 1979
What you may say, has this ancient history got to do with our parlous state today? Now, almost forty years after she challenged for the leadership and more than two decades after the Iron lady's overthrown, Britain is once again teetering on the brink of disaster, misruled by a broken-backed Coalition presided over by a reincarnated Heath : a false Conservative poseur who has surrounded himself with a cabal of cronies indifferent to or actively hostile to the core values that have made the Conservatives the world's most durable party of government.
Tragedy: The front page of the Daily Mail from March 31 1979, after Airey Neave was assassinated outside the House of Commons by the IRANo wonder the surviving Wet dinosaurs of the Heath era, the men who plotted Thatcher's downfall and finally saw their treachery triumph, look on in benign approval as Heath-Cameron trashes the Thatcherite achievement and contemptuously tramples on Tory ideals. No wonder that these old men - Heseltine, Clarke, Patton, Rifkind - have all been given jobs in Dave's regime while Thatcherite elder statesmen like Norman Tebbit have been disdainfully ignored.
And no wonder, too, that this out-of-touch Government of posh boys is running headlong into the mire. Rudderless, rootless, giving a disastrous impression of favouring the rich over the poor, squeezing the squeezed middle even further; shovelling billions that we haven't got into the EU's bottomless coffers via the IMF, concreting the countryside over to house the immigrants they are too useless to keep out; and now giving out the unmissable stench of rancid political corruption, the Cameron Government is in deep, deep trouble - as next Thursday's disastrous local government polls will amply prove.
The pattern of the Heathite 1970s is repeating itself with eerie accuracy. Just as Heath promised in 1970 to free Britain from the shackles of an overweening state, so Cameron promised to replace a bureaucratic Big Brother monster with a 'Big Society' of volunteers. In office, however, both men have only bloated the beast of the Big State with more tax, more regulations and - perhaps above all- a slavish subservience to an increasingly sinister European Union - the leviathan whose jaws Heath entered with a promise that it would not erode Britain's sovereignty. Forty years on, Dave is happily signing away the last shreds of our right to govern ourselves to the unelected Brussels elite, and denying us even the semblance of a say in the matter.
Just as in 1974 the Government is increasingly unpopular, drowning in debt and thrashing around for a coherent policy on anything at all. Just as in 1974, a lacklustre Labour opposition is content to wait for power to fall yet again into its hands. Which it will surely do unless - and I know this is a big ask - Tory MPs find the spine to do something about it and a new Airey Neave emerges to organise their resistance.
Turmoil: The Coalition government has become deeply unpopular, and a Tory leadership contest is not beyond the realms of possibilityUnder current rules, all it would take to trigger a Tory leadership election would be a letter from just 15% of the 305 Conservative MPs - that's around 46 of them - to the Chairman of their 1922 Committee, Graham Brady, calling for a vote of no confidence in David Cameron. The figure of 46 is around half of the 81 Tory rebels who courageously defied Dave's bullying three line Whip last October in calling for an EU referendum, so the numbers are there. What's lacking, perhaps is the necessary courage. And of course, a new Airey Neave to browbeat, charm, or cajole frightened Tory MPs into doing the right thing. Changing leadership horses in the mid-stream of a Parliament would be a risk - it might break up the Coalition, or lead to a minority Government under a new leader. Anything, however, would be better than the current Eton mess which is leading the Tory party, and Britain itself, to certain perdition.
var rcShoutCache = '{}'; window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({flush:true}); DM.later('bundle', function(){ if (window.ArticlePage) { new ArticlePage(); } });
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Kara Scott
2nd World Rank
Final Table WSOP
World Series Of Poker
0 comments:
Post a Comment