Last month, just before Christmas, I had a drink with the director of a moderately important policy institute. After a few comments about the dreadfulness of Tony Blair and his government, we fell to discussing the Conservative Party. We were both impressed with Ian Duncan Smith's performance as Leader, and felt cautiously optimistic about the coming year. The Conservatives, we agreed, were not yet back in town, but they were fast approaching the suburbs.

It is possible today, I think, to be less cautiously optimistic. The Conservative Party does seem to be back. It is defending traditional liberties like trial by jury against Labour attacks. It is abandoning its old obsession with what are falsely called "family values". It has proposed a workable replacement for the shadowy, discredited remnant that Labour has made of the House of Lords. It is making a radical critique of Labour's handling of health and transport; and in taking up the case of Rose Addis, it has found a way of simultaneously attacking almost every Labour vice - its incompetence, its arrogance, its dishonesty, its bullying, its siding with public sector workers against those who have to use their services, its general lack of human decency. The opinion polls are still showing the usual Labour lead, but I do not think they will do so for much longer.

Of course, this is how Conservative oppositions generally behave. They listen to the people, take up and champion their concerns, and sound refreshingly normal. Then they win an election and straightaway forget
everything they claim to have learnt in opposition. I have written at some length elsewhere about the Quisling Right - those people who look and sound like conservatives, but who make sure never to threaten the anti-conservative forces that actually run the country - and will not repeat myself here. [See Free Life Commentary, issue 50] But it may be that the only real difference between the Hague and Duncan Smith
leaderships is the fluency and coordination of the lies.

All being said, there may be room for hope. Very likely, the Conservatives are back to their old game of implying more than they promise and of promising more than they intend to deliver. The brave talk now of civil liberties will not be remembered when they are back in office, and carrying forward the abolitions of due process began when they were last in office and continued under Labour. The talk of reducing the financial power of the State will also mean little once they have the means of trying to do it: any tax cuts they make will be balanced by increases elsewhere - so that, however more convenient they make it, the tax burden will be simply rearranged. As for multi-culturalism and political correctness, there is not even a promise here.  

But this does not necessarily make the Conservatives a hopeless cause. Every so often in the past century, the Conservative Party has found itself with a core agenda - a list of things that must be done if conservative politics and even the Conservative Party are to remain possible in this country. The agenda may not have been chosen by the Conservative Party: more often than not, it has been imposed by external pressures. But, once adopted, it defines and justifies the Conservative claim to be in power. This gives both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it silences the Quisling Right in all matters touching on the core agenda. It supplies a purpose and commitment that will let a government walk through crises that would  otherwise destabilise it.   On the other hand, any essential compromise will almost guarantee collapse.

We can see this with the Conservatives between about 1975 and 1990. In opposition, they set up a cry about "elective dictatorship" and the growth fo a socialist bureaucracy. In government, the put the Common Law though a legislative shredding machine and funded the rise of political correctness. They also variously lied and sleepwalked themselves three quarters into a European superstate. But these broken promises - or "aspirations" - were not part of their core agenda. That was about reforming economic management. They committed themselves to stopping the rise of taxes and spending of the past twenty years, to ending inflation, to forcing market discipline on the state sector, to curbing the power of the trade unions, to providing a climate in which private enterprise could begin to flourish again. And that is what they delivered without much compromise. Indeed, for all their dithering and betrayal in other areas, they faced their two greatest trials of nerve within the core agenda without flinching.

In 1981, the country was at the bottom of its deepest recession in fifty years. It seemed for the dissidents in the Thatcher Cabinet plain common sense to relax monetary policy. However, the medium term financial strategy came before apparent convenience. In the budget of that year, the Government cut borrowing and raised taxes. To do anything else would have stripped it of the intellectual legitimacy that, while intangible, was essential to its survival in office. Again, in 1984, there was almost certainly a compromise possible with the striking coal miners.  But the new union laws had to be made to work - and made to work they were, regardless of social cost.

Whether or not they want it, the Conservatives now have another core agenda. This is getting the country out of the European Union. If the next Conservative Government delivers on this, it can count on a critical mass of solid and even impassioned support. If it fails to deliver, it will find that there are perhaps two dozen Conservative Members of Parliament and thousands of activists who define themselves as Eurosceptics first and as Conservatives a poor second. These will unhesitatingly split the Party and destroy the Government. And there are several million Conservative voters who will do nothing spectacular - until the next big day when their support is needed, and they sit out the day at home.

An intelligent Conservative leadership must be aware of this fact. What made the Conservatives under William Hague so worthless for Eurosceptics was that he did not seem to be aware of it. There is every chance that, had he won the 2001 election, he would have run off to Brussels and come back with a surrender on all essential matters - and then looked on astonished as his Government fell apart within weeks. I may be wrong, but I feel that Mr Duncan Smith does know his core agenda.

And there are many reasons to suppose that withdrawal would be very easy to sell to the electorate. Many pessimists refer to the 1975 referendum, when a two thirds majority for leaving was quickly turned into a two thirds majority for staying in. But circumstances are now greatly altered. British membership in the 1970s rested on four solid foundations. First, the Establishment was broadly in favour of membership. Second, it did seem there would be advantages from membership. Germany was still the "economic miracle" of Europe; France had recovered from its near-collapse of the 1950s; and even Italy was growing strongly. At the same time, the British economy was at best stagnant. It was easy to argue that joining would force reforms that could not otherwise be carried through. Third, the loss of sovereignty from signing the Treaty of Rome was more theoretical than actual. Whatever the words said on paper, they gave the central institutions in Brussels no practical control. Indeed, in the early 1980s, Britain and France followed exactly opposite economic policies without interference from the European Commission. Edward Heath may have signed a whole book of blank cheques in 1972, but very few of them were cashed in the next fifteen years, and never for amounts that most people thought much about. Fourth, and following form the above, public opinion was never more than languidly hostile to membership. A few lies and promises were enough to turn it round for the referendum.

Today, all four of these supports has given or is giving way. The Establishment is divided over continued membership. Second, there are no economic benefits. Whatever complaints a libertarian can make, the British economy has, by European standards, performed impressively well for many years. The main Euroland economies show every chance of settling into permafrost recession. So far as the economics are concerned, we are chained to a corpse dripping with germs that might easily infect us. As for the loss of sovereignty, we are no longer talking about giving up Commonwealth preference or banning prawn cocktail crisps, but about the Euro, Europol, the Corpus Juris, the Rapid Reaction Force, and the seizure of our private pension funds to save the Italian and German welfare states from bankruptcy. For these reasons - and because of an autonomous process of thought - public opinion is already half prepared to support withdrawal. An intelligent Conservative Prime Minister would have far less opposition to this than Margaret Thatcher had to the Medium Term Financial Strategy.

Just imagine. Mr Duncan Smith sets out for Brussels. He really want this country to stay in Europe, he might say reassuringly at his preparatory news conference. All we want of Europe, he adds, is acceptance that we shall never join the Euro, control over British agricultural policy, and the right to ignore all European Union laws and regulations that have not been fully debated and approved by our own democratically elected House of Commons. I can think of no convincing reply to something so eminently reasonable. Of course, the other European heads of government would think of none either. They belong to Establishments that have faced no serious opposition to their European policy, and which never have understood, nor will understand, the nature and depth of British hostility to being in a United States of Europe. Mr. Duncan Smith could come home with a long, sad face, and he could be out within six months of his taking office.

Some of my friends insist that Mr Duncan Smith is neither bright nor charming - and therefore never likely to win an election or doing anything worthwhile if he does win. These qualities may justly describe him, but they do not necessarily condemn. It takes no great intellectual skills to know what needs to be done about Europe, or how to do it. As for charm, William Hague had plenty of that, and look where it got him.  It may be that Mr Duncan Smith's lack of superficial grace is at the moment a virtue. By not trying to compete on the Prime Minister's own
ground, he is providing a clear and refreshing alternative.

Look at Mr Blair. He is not, I think, a very bad man. On a scale of evil that includes monsters like Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, he does not even register. But he craves adulation and has not the strength of character needed to do without it when the public interest requires. For nearly the past five years, he has sprayed us and the world with a continual stream of childish and often contradictory platitudes. Because he is weak, he is dishonest. Because he is dishonest, his actions have too often produced consequences the opposite of what he may genuinely have desired. These consequences have ranged from bringing the country into ridicule and disrepute, to damaging the Constitution, to risking the lives of our servicemen in pointless and therefore immoral wars, and frequently to the massacre of foreign civilians. Give me the choice between a block of wood and someone whose behaviour and even looks remind me of a faded matinee idol, and I know which I would have.

I say again, I may be wrong. Perhaps the new Conservative leadership is just waiting to turn as rotten as the last, and that to support it is the same waste of time and effort. Certainly, those of us who are running our own campaigns on the European issue should not give them up or put ourselves under Conservative direction. But, looking at the past few weeks of opposition, I do suspect the time may have come to stop being beastly to the Tories.

Sean Gabb 28 Jan 2002