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Changing the light bulb

13 October 2003

The Tory party lacks credibility because it can't agree what sort of credibility it wants. Until it does, all its handsome new policy initiatives will be beside the point.

The former British foreign secretary Lord Carrington, when an international peace envoy in the former Yugoslavia, famously remarked that in order to broker a peace in the region it was necessary that both sides should, in some sense, desire it. But if, as it appeared, they wanted to fight, there was really very little to be done.

This is a version of the old joke, how many psycho-therapists does it take to change a light bulb? The answer, of course, is only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.

The wisdom of this should not be lost on the Tory party in the aftermath of their annual conference last week. Ringing declarations of eternal loyalty to the party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, were drowned out by the mutterings and dark plots of those whose true wish is to replace him with someone else. Mr Duncan Smith's speech, which, in relation to his audience, was always likely to be a success, may or may not have seen off the plotters for the time being. But even if it has they will soon be back, because the Conservative party remains at war with itself and it doesn’t want not to be at this moment in its history.

The party cannot expect to win the next general election. It would have to be ahead in the polls now if it was going to do that. Consequently no side in the various internal debates that divide the party is willing to make the concessions that are necessary for the presentation of a unified front. The battle remains engaged, therefore, between the traditional "broad church" Tories from the pragmatic end of the spectrum and the narrower, more overtly right wing agenda of those who see themselves (erroneously) as the inheritors of Margaret Thatcher. (They forget that she was much more pragmatic in office than subsequently she was represented.)

The performance of the Duncan Smith team epitomises this fissured political culture. The man himself is one of the awkward squad who roughed up John Major when prime minister. But his background is traditional Tory and when he speaks of love of country you sense that, even if nobody else does, he knows what he means. The problem is that the warm beer and village cricket allure, which is potentially still a strong one, only works when it comes from a consistent and reliable source. The Conservative party will need to be self-confident, unified, mainstream and even slightly somnolent if it is to work this trick.

A party that was like this would not need lorry loads of radical policies to achieve political momentum. Modern politics is as much about good management as good ideas. Rather more so, in fact, because, unless the ideas are particularly good, they can often cause more trouble than they solve. Labour came to power in 1997 aided less by the policies it had than those liability policies that it no longer had. Having dumped the liabilities it got the votes because it looked to a sceptical electorate to be a considerably better bet than the other lot. Now, six years on, and with Labour credibility taking a bash, a confident, resurgent, unified Conservative could be looking to return the compliment in two years' time.

That the Tories are not confident, not resurgent and not unified would be any leader's problem. Fundamentally it's a problem of personnel - of building a unity of purpose to replace the fracturing into special interests to which the Conservative corporation, like others before it, have succumbed. That's where the light bulb has to want to change, and if it does not it requires a very good pyscho-therapist indeed to encourage it. It requires a great performer, a large political animal with credibility and engagement with the wider world. One thinks of Kenneth Clarke or Ann Widdecombe or even Portillo. One does not think of Duncan Smith or his predecessor, William Hague.

To their credit, both men knew this. So they each attempted their own bottom-up approach, exploring the grass roots of their party and searching out policy proposals to give their mission a distinctive feel. Engaging with the party seems intuitively a good idea, but it's really a retreat to the comfort zone - the ageing Conservative grass roots are the last place to look for the message that is going to reach out to the wider, younger, more cynical world. The proposals themselves, therefore, have less to do with convincing the public of their rightness as with giving the leader the credibility of doing something - almost anything at all.

The engagingly frank shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin has played along wonderfully with this demand for eye-catching policy clothes. He's come up with some corkers, including locally elected police sheriffs and paying for 40,000 more bobbies on the beat out of the economies to be gained by processing all asylum seekers on an offshore island. It's all good fun, and the BBC in their zeal for even-handed reporting have done a good job of taking it wonderfully seriously, but the intelligent Mr Letwin of all people knows that these are not plans that he will ever have to enact.

So, the future of the Conservative party is a story that will run for a while yet. The party desperately needs credibility, for credibility is a party's soul, but precisely for this reason the different factions in the party do not want it to acquire a credibility that is not their own. It's a problem that won't sort itself out until it wants to, and it won't want to until the present generation is cleared out and a new, hungrier generation comes in on its heels. In the meantime, what general lessons can be learned from their predicament?

The key one is this: trying to solve the problem you think you can solve is no substitute for solving the problem that you need to solve. And if the problem you need to solve is one that the people implicated in it do not want to be solved, then you have quite another problem again. As a maxim it exposes an interesting contrast with the principle of "concentrating on the do-able" - the idea of tackling a large and apparently insurmountable problem by addressing the bits of it that you think you can grasp. This is good, folksy wisdom, but, to be any use, these "do-able" bits and pieces have to be true components of the real problem and not, as in this case, displacement activities to draw attention from the issue that counts.