Why is it all going so crazy?
The Tories did regicide so much better in the past
Why has it all gone so crazy? The Conservative government is disintegrating into acrimony and bullying. Serial resignations, jostling in the division lobbies bitter factionalism - all set against a backdrop of deepening financial chaos and international conflict. It's beginning to feel a bit like the fall of Rome. Has Westminster ever been so febrile in the past? As the fourth Tory PM in six years heads to the knackers yard it’s worth recalling how they did things back in the day.
There has of course been turmoil before. I arrived in Westminster as a BBC political correspondent in November 1990, just in time to hear Sir Geoffrey Howe deliver a fatal blow to the most successful Tory Prime Minister since Churchill, Margaret Thatcher. I have to confess I missed its significance entirely. The Chancellor's resignation statement, delivered in the sonorous almost soporific tones that were his trademark, referred vaguely to cricket bats and broken stumps.
The former Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, famously said that being attacked by Howe was like being “savaged by a dead sheep”. Was this really a stab in the back? No it wasn't. It was a stab in the front - a fatal one. Two days later Michael Heseltine launched his leadership campaign against Thatcher and in less than a fortnight she was gone. A succession of Tory ministers, led by the treasury secretary, Kenneth Clarke, had trooped into the Prime Minister's office and told her she couldn't go on. It was an astonishing coup conducted with brutal efficiency.
Thatcher had won four election victories, defeated the trades unions, transformed the economy. She was a global stateswoman. By “doing business” with the reformist Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev – who was shortly to experience his own defenestration – she effectively ended the Cold War. How could someone of this stature be deposed so suddenly, with so little fuss? The markets hardly blinked.
On the morning of 22nd of November 1990, they really did announce her departure on the London tube. In the Members Lobby of the House of Commons Tory MPs and ministers were in tears. The Thatcherites led by Michael Portillo, the defence Secretary were trying, hopelessly, to organise a fight back. They thought she had been deposed by treacherous pro-Europeans who wanted to yield British sovereignty to Brussels. Plus ca change.
The governing party could not have been divided over a more sensitive issue: whether or not Britain should become part of a federal Europe and allow the pound to be hitched forever to the deutschemark. To Conservatives who remembered the Second World War this was an appalling capitulation to alien powers, and Thatcher had been their last line of defence. It was brutal.
But somehow the men in grey suits kept the show on the road. A “grey man”, John Major, was drafted in as leader and the Tories somehow went on to win the 1992 general election. The civil service, a less visible but more powerful agent of continuity than it perhaps is today, kept the business of government going. There was no chaos on the financial exchanges, as here has been today - no run on the pound, even though inflation was running at 10% and the issues facing the divided government were all about the fate of the national currency.
In recent weeks we have heard distraught Tories lament that the calibre of Conservative Prime Ministers has declined in the last thirty years. And it is fair to say that, in 1990, Liz Truss would have been an obscure backbencher. That's not being unkind. There were many Tory and Labour backbench MPs who did honest toil suited to their abilities and never dreamed of becoming cabinet ministers let alone entering Number Ten.
It was the age, it was said, of the “big beasts”. Michael Heseltine is still a formidable figure today, in 1990 he seemed a leonine force of nature. Sir Geoffrey Howe was a wolf in dead sheep's clothing. Kenneth Clarke, Nigel Lawson, Norman Lamont were all potential party leaders. By that I mean that they had qualities of leadership and intellect and at least conveyed the impression that they were men of vision, capable of driving history. They had authority. They had “bottom”.
Politicians today seem much reduced: fallible, accident-prone - hapless victims of forces beyond their control. But I don't actually believe that politicians as a race are in some way genetically inferior today. Most of them were incubated in Oxbridge as they are now. We get the politicians we deserve. History makes great men and women, not the other way round.
Nor were politicians treated with exaggerated respect or deference in the 1980s and 90s. This was the age of alternative comedy. Tory ministers were mercilessly lampooned, week in week out, by programmes like Spitting Image - depicted as morons led by a cross-dressing dictator. Margaret Thatcher was loathed by millions – not least in Scotland where her poll tax was to destroy the Scottish Conservative Party. The “Community Charge” as it was officially called led to riots in Trafalgar Square.
So there was carnage back in the day, but somehow it was all kept within bounds. Institutions are perhaps less solid today than they were in the 1990s, the elites were less divided. Political discourse was not dominated by the shrieking of social media. Populism probably played a part in the decline and fall of Westminster, though it is difficult to locate exactly how.
In 1990 it was Conservative MPs alone who elected the leader of their party, not the party membership. One person one vote may have seemed like a good way to ensure that Tory leaders are more grounded, less arrogant, and genuinely representative of the party they lead. But that only works if the party is broadly representative of the country. Arguably it was under Boris Johnson in the wake of Brexit. But things went pear shaped after Tory MPs, of left and right, united to remove him after party gate.
Over the summer, Liz Truss told the party faithful what they wanted to hear. She promised to deliver a dash for growth by cutting taxes – the holy grail of popular Conservatism. Rishi Sunak told them exactly what would happen, with remarkable foresight. They went with heart over head. The former Chancellor would have been the MPs' choice, not least because he performed well in the media and had negotiated the pandemic furlough with some imagination and competence. After this weeks' blood-letting he, or someone like him,may be installed through a coronation. But the pieces will never be put back together as they were.
It is time for another grey man to take over: Sir Keir Starmer.