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Mr Howard of the daylight

3 November 2003

Michael Howard is promising a new kind of politics, without "narrow partisan opportunism". The British public may be ready for this, but is Mr Howard? Really?

Michael Howard's announcement last Thursday that he would be a candidate for leader of the Conservative party had more the flavour of an acceptance speech than of one setting out a distinctive stall. It is traditional in the aftermath of an election to preach unity; the victor who, hours before, was laying into his opponents, naturally seeks to put such antagonisms behind him and claim the allegiance of all. Clever Mr Howard has tried to play this trick in reverse and by claiming everybody's allegiance from the outset avoid having an election in the first place.

It was well executed, although underpinned by the knowledge that it had probably succeeded before it had started. The other main contenders for the job had already backed off. But the appeal to the centre ground was surprisingly unequivocal; fearing nothing from the right Mr Howard made his pitch for the moderates of the party by declaiming a "new kind of politics" of sweet reason and pure daylight. "We won't hesitate to give credit to the government when it gets things right," he told them. "We won't oppose for opposition's sake.... We will expose the government's failures not with gleeful pleasure at seeing them fail, but because we passionately want things to be better for our fellow-citizens."

There was loads more in that vein. Social and public service reform; moderation on Europe; choice for all; trusting the people; respect for each other as well as for our opponents ; even this ringing declaration: "We will never place our electoral self-interest before the good of the country. No narrow partisan opportunism for us." Never? None at all? One would have said that the speech would have flowed easily from the mouth of Tony Blair, but that last bit is going to far. The prime minister knows perfectly well that electoral self-interest is the life blood of political power.

And so, of course, does Mr Howard. So what was he really saying? The message of inclusiveness was addressed primarily at divided Conservatives, but was dressed up for respectability's sake to encompass the entire political spectrum. Mr Howard is clever enough to know that his own political persona is mired in shadow, and his attempt to rescue it with a Portillo-like conversion to the sunny, liberal uplands is a bold exposition of that classic politicians' trick, that if you say that black is white loudly enough and with sufficient conviction people will be too taken aback to disagree with you. By the time the liberal Conservatives spot that they've been had, it will all be over.

Well, maybe. Or maybe Mr Howard's cleverness extends further than that. Perhaps the stall he has set out is intended to outlast the Conservative leadership fracas and speak directly to a wider electorate that is genuinely fed up with opportunistic and adversarial politics. If true, that would really be interesting. It would signify a recognition that politics in Britain has entered a new empirical age, in which ancient tribal differences about the objectives of policy have given way to differences about how to achieve widely accepted goals. According to this analysis the "what works" approach trumpeted by New Labour is little more than an acceptance of a post-ideology reality in which the successful politicians will be the ones who get it right more often than not. Getting it right is a matter of understanding the problem you are trying to solve, and for this the left-right stances of the past are no help whatsoever.

For Britain to be in the vanguard of post-ideology politics should not be surprising. The antique mannerisms of Westminster can obscure the fact that this was the first industrial democracy and remains in many ways the most advanced. The sort of tribal practices that characterise the two party system in the U.S. have played little part in a post-war, Butskellite Britain that signed up to social democracy long before the term acquired its present meaning. Ironically it was the ideology-driven Thatcher government of the 1980s that cemented the post-ideological trend by initiating government by agency. This was the idea - first given life in the form of the regulators that grew out of the privatisation boom - that government only needed to set out the ground rules for an administrative activity and then let an independent management team get on with the work.

It is an approach that now applies to huge swathes of public life. Almost all of local government has been de-politicised in this way. Councils have so many things that they must do with their money and so many standards to meet that the chance of having anything left over for politically contentious spending is remote. Central government activities, also, from the Bank of England to the NHS to the prison service, are managed in this way. The room in the NHS for real (as opposed to huffing and puffing) politics is minimal. The only issue is how well the resources are managed. Opposition politicians continue to score points in such areas but they know perfectly well that when their turn comes the problems, and the potential solutions, will be exactly the same.

In this context the pressure for politicians is no longer on the differentiation of approach but the capacity to think imaginatively about solutions and create effective outcomes. In government it is the quality of management that counts, and good management requires co-operation, not perpetual conflict. The rigid party system that has made politics a sort of institutionalised warfare is long past its historical sell-by date. The electorate feels this, but the system has refused to die, kept alive by the appetite of newspapers for the political and human drama than only polarisation can provide.

To feed their habit, newspapers take complicated subjects such as taxation, crime, immigration and Europe and reduce them to totemic good/bad, black/white, right/left and soft/hard issues. Politicians play along with this game because, it seems, they are too frightened not to. They persist in seeing their profession in the simple terms of winning and losing and are therefore vulnerable to equally crude analyses of policy and quick to position themselves on whichever side offers short-term advantage. The consequence is that the demanding managerial challenges of government do not get the sophisticated problem-solving treatment they deserve. It is not easy to believe that the new Mr Howard of the daylight is proposing to change all that, but the moment is certainly ripe if he should choose to do so.