1 The Green Shoots of a Conservative Revival? Stephen Ingle

2004 was a wilderness year, or so I claimed last year, and suggested that 2005, though it was likely to be an election year, offered little prospect of major change in the political climate or indeed of any excitement aroused even by the possibility of such a change.1 In short, from the party political perspective, another wilderness year. This safe prediction proved to be accurate and causes me to refl ect that Andrew Russell’s claim that the general election dominated the year is not one that I would support. It was, in fact, rather like Bunny Clubs of the 1960s, where nothing happened and nothing was supposed to happen. The election aroused little public excitement and, very soon after, it simply ceased to be a topic of conversation. A government that had generally lost the affection and trust of the people, including many of its own supporters, was returned to offi ce largely because, in the public perception, there was simply no viable alternative. Its majority, slashed by nearly 100, was still easily large enough in theory to allow it to complete any legislative programme that enjoyed general party support. On the other hand, this is not to suggest that because the election was almost a non-event for the citizen, the result was without interest to the student of politics.

Stirrings in the party system

I argued last year that a two-party system, to be effective, requires almost as a sine qua non two relatively charismatic party leaders leading two relatively united parties, and that history suggests that this requirement is met less often than we might suppose. Michael Howard came to the leadership of his party too late and with too much baggage. No one could have seriously entertained at any time before or during the election campaign the notion that he might lead his party to victory. The party’s strapline, ‘Are you thinking

1 2 Palgrave Review of British Politics 2005 what we’re thinking?’, far from offering a stirring call to arms to supporters and potential supporters, was generally considered mildly risible, and the focus of its campaign, on issues relating primarily to immigration and political asylum, was largely static and ineffectual. Nevertheless, the party gained some ground. Importantly, the haemorrhaging of votes to the Liberal Democrats was staunched for the fi rst time since 1992 and more generally the party won back seats in its traditional areas of strength. Indeed, the Conservatives won more votes in England than did Labour. It was taken for granted that Howard would resign and that a leadership contest would take place (though some hoped a change of leader might not necessitate an election). In retrospect, the way of Howard’s going and the campaign and election that eventuated were surprisingly unacrimonious. In fact, so successful was the process that we are inclined to forget that the whole exercise was fraught with the possibility of further acrimony and division, and indeed perhaps complete disintegration. As the contest got underway, few would have predicted the outcome. It was clear that the two ‘big beasts’ who stood, Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm Rifkind, were, whatever their merits, ruled out of serious contention. Clarke had been rejected because of his pro-European stance before. In 2005 he was the same man but older. Rifkind lacked the stature of Clarke and, having been led by one compromise candidate from the Thatcher administration, the party was not looking for a second. That left three candidates in serious contention: Liam Fox, who was seen as representing the party’s right wing; David Davis, the front-runner, who, though also of the right, commanded support from across the party; and the untried David Cameron, who was seen as a moderniser and champion of so-called compassionate conservatism. Not for the fi rst time, a battle for succession was to be initiated at Blackpool, at the annual conference (though in 2005 none took the opportunity of being photographed taking the waters as Quintin Hogg had done in 1963 – perhaps because, after all, he lost!). Most commentators assumed that Davis would take the contest beyond reasonable doubt with a powerful conference speech. In the event, his speech was lacklustre, pedestrian and unimaginative, and compared unfavourably with Cameron’s, which, though largely general in tone and even aphoristic, was delivered convincingly and without notes. One contrast between the two men, which seemed to give Davis a considerable advantage, was their background. Davis was raised by a single parent on a housing estate in one of the less salubrious parts of London: he owed his successes in life to hard work and character. Cameron, on the other hand, came from a wealthy background and was an Old Etonian; the kind of leader the Conservatives had eschewed since the inauguration of leadership elections. In his speech, Davis won applause for alluding to his background, but failed to make what he had to say convincingly relevant. Cameron, on the other hand, using a tactic that would have delighted Napoleon, used his apparent The Green Shoots of a Conservative Revival? 3 disadvantage in this respect to advantage: it really does not matter where we have come from, he said, all that really matters is where we are going. From this point, although the campaign seemed to go on interminably, Cameron’s position only strengthened. One issue alone was raised that might have derailed the Cameron bandwagon, an allegation that he had used drugs as a young man. He steadfastly refused to answer questions on this subject, saying that it was a private matter. Davis did not make this a direct campaign issue – indeed, given the nature of the campaign this would have been unwise to say the least – and though the media chose to focus on it, it did not seem to worry the party faithful unduly. The parliamentary party voted in October and fi rst Clarke and then Fox were eliminated, and Davis and Cameron went forward to the party at large, with the latter well in the lead. Nearly 200,000 members voted and the party declared this to be a turnout of 77 per cent, though with what confi dence we can only surmise. By any measure, though, the party had shrunk alarmingly since its hey-day in the 1950s. Nevertheless, by December the Conservative Party had a new leader and the eyes of the nation were fi xed upon him, especially during his fi rst dispatch-box encounter as leader with the Prime Minister. Just as Blair had showed himself able to raise his game when Michael Howard fi rst brought his forensic skills and direct, splenetic debating style to bear against him, so, once again, he performed masterfully. Perhaps more interesting, however, was the performance of the inexperienced Cameron. He began with an attack on what he called Punch and Judy politics, which nobody wanted, he said, least of all him. Cameron continued by offering his party’s support to the Prime Minister in pushing his education policies through the House, against his own backbenchers. Blair, he said, could be as radical as he wanted to be. It is worth analysing Cameron’s tactics in some detail. First he attacks adversarialism, knowing that the general public always expresses distaste for ‘yah-boo’ politics. Then, in the most robust adversarial fashion, he deftly seeks to exploit divisions in Labour about radical education reform. In his speech to the party conference, Blair had earlier declared that with respect to his previous controversial public sector reforms, he now found himself wishing he had been more radical not less. Cameron was offering Blair the opportunity to be as radical as he wanted, with Conservative support. So by appearing to be non-adversarial, Cameron was seeking to extract the maximum adversarial advantage. More daring yet was his approach to the third party. He openly appealed to Liberal Democrats to defect to the Conservatives to create a truly ‘liberal’ party that could defeat Labour. Nothing, surely, would more directly promote adversarial, Punch and Judy politics than the demise of the third party. Kennedy’s tetchy response did little to disguise the unease that Cameron’s vibrant leadership had caused the Liberal Democrats. In no time at all, informed sources within the party were airing their anxieties to the media concerning their own leader’s continuing low profi le. The public support that he got from his senior colleagues at the time was signifi cantly less than wholehearted. In short, Cameron’s impact 4 Palgrave Review of British Politics 2005 had been instant and dramatic. He spoke of himself as the man of the future and was confi dent that Blair would realise the signifi cance of this, for hadn’t he himself, once upon a time, been seen as the man of the future? As a post- script, by the end of the year the Conservatives had overtaken Labour in most opinion polls. More signifi cant for the longer term, perhaps, were the rather vague policy pronouncements that began to emerge from some of the senior members of Cameron’s inclusive Shadow Cabinet. The Conservatives would defend the interests of ordinary people against those of big business; they would act to lessen the gulf between the rich and the poor; they would ease the burden of legislation from the shoulders of everyone. That these policy preferences were pretty much mutually irreconcilable bothered them not a jot. As for their own party, it would strive to become more representative of the nation, in terms of class, gender and ethnicity. (There is perhaps a mild irony in the fact that the party is at last determined to get younger just as the population is getting older.) All in all, it is generally agreed by the media that for the fi rst time since 1992 the Conservative Party can consider the future with some confi dence: Labour is in disarray and the Liberal Democrats appear to be losing confi dence and support. But party leaders know well how much is still to be done. As for a lessening of adversarial politics in 2006 and beyond, we need only briefl y to consider the belligerently partisan response taken by the Shadow Foreign Secretary to Blair’s EU budget settlement, in which some of Britain’s rebate was surrendered, to appreciate that this is no more than a smokescreen. In fact, had we listened more carefully, we might have been able to hear William Hague crowing: ‘That’s the way to do it!’

A predictable election and a weakened Prime Minister

As for Labour, its electoral victory was so predictable that, despite its historical uniqueness, it did not excite or even greatly interest the British public, nor indeed did it appear to give the party itself much cause for celebration. The problems that had beset Blair’s previous government were still to be confronted and his own position as party leader had become substantially weaker because he had lost the confi dence of many of his more traditional backbenchers; and they and his supporters knew that if Blair were not yet yesterday’s man, he even more certainly would not be tomorrow’s man – he himself had declared that he would not serve a full term. Moreover, not only had Labour lost 46 seats,2 but it had also secured the support of only 22 per cent of the electorate. Blair’s response, typically, was to declare that the electoral process had been invaluable. He had listened to the British people and now knew what they expected from his government. (Happily, this coincided with what he was going to attempt to do anyway.) To the observer it was evident that Blair was no longer perceived to be the electoral asset he had been. Gordon Brown played what Russell rightly calls a pivotal role in The Green Shoots of a Conservative Revival? 5 the campaign, and very soon after there were calls from within the party for Blair to stand down. His public image was soon to be enhanced, however, by two distinctly different but almost simultaneous events in July: the awarding of the 2012 Olympic Games to London on the 6th, and the terrorist bombs that shattered the City’s peace and killed some 50 members of the public the very next day. The British public had expected that Paris’s Olympic bid would be successful, but Blair’s championing of the British bid had been far more prominent and more strategically astute than Chirac’s for Paris. He had no time to bask in any refl ected glory, however, for the next day four explosions shook the British capital, bringing the war against terror and its associated death and destruction to the streets of Britain. The instinct of the overwhelming majority of the British people of all religions and backgrounds was to unite, and as national leader Blair was the immediate benefi ciary of this predilection for unity. At the time of these events Blair had been hosting a G8 summit at Gleneagles, the outcome of which was broadly welcomed by Bob Geldof and the Feed the World Movement. In brief, Blair’s prestige was higher in the summer than it had been for several years, though the killing of an innocent man by the Metropolitan Police shortly after a second and fortunately unsuccessful day of bombs in London dented the government’s prestige vicariously. The manner in which Blair responded to the challenge of terrorism was, however, maladroit. Home Secretary Charles Clarke promoted a Terrorism Bill, one of whose provisions was to extend the time a suspect could be held in custody without being charged from 14 to 90 days. Now, although this apparently enjoyed general support and was welcomed by sections of the popular press, it did not have the support of either opposition party or of many Labour backbenchers. The government had sought for cross- party support on the bill but knew that it would not be forthcoming on such a substantive custodial extension. Blair chose to take two questionable steps to secure the legislation he wanted. First, he prevented Clarke from negotiating a compromise with the opposition, though one seemed to be on the cards – an extension to 28 days had been mooted – and, second, he involved senior police offi cers to an unprecedented extent in giving public support to government policy. Blair himself had been misled by an apparently enthusiastic reception when he had addressed the parliamentary party on this and other matters. In the event, the government lost the vote on extension by no fewer than 31 votes, with 49 Labour backbenchers voting with the opposition. How could Blair have miscalculated so badly when to all observers the result had been entirely predictable? To put the defeat into perspective, these defeats (there were two) were the worst since Callaghan’s devolution programme was mauled in 1978. Immediately, commentators drew attention to the government’s legislative programme, major elements of which enjoyed little support from traditionalists. Labour’s refuseniks, having tasted blood, would surely use their strength to secure important concessions from the 6 Palgrave Review of British Politics 2005 leadership. But then, perhaps the government would win the support of Cameron and the Conservative opposition! Blair’s hold on the parliamentary party had already begun to loosen, however. As Philip Cowley shows, backbench rebellion had already become a regular feature well before Blair announced his intention to resign. His fi gures tell us that one division in fi ve was subject to rebellion, more than in any other post-war government. By the end of the 2001–05 Parliament, he continues, the press was simply not bothering to report rebellions, even fairly large ones.

Changing fortunes: the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives

Despite superfi cial appearances to the contrary, 2005 was not a good year for the Liberal Democrats. It is true that in the general election the party won more seats and a greater share of the vote, but in private they hoped for substantially more. They were still benefi ting from Labour’s unpopularity over the Iraq war and they were confi dent enough of the shortcomings of the Conservative Party’s campaign to give high profi le to their own policy of ‘decapitation’, in which they identifi ed the seats of members of the Conservative Shadow Cabinet as specifi c targets. Clearly, they expected to gain votes from both major opponents and were confi dent of infl icting particular harm upon Howard’s Conservatives. Kennedy’s campaign, however, lacked focus and vibrancy, and this could not be attributed solely to the fact that his wife gave birth during that campaign. When questioned at a press conference on key details of the party’s policy on local income tax as a replacement for council tax, Kennedy blustered, proved unable to provide even basic information, and turned in something approaching panic to his advisers. Although this clip of fi lm is unlikely to achieve the iconic status of that showing the then Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood’s hapless attempt to come to terms with the Welsh national anthem, or that showing Neil Kinnock’s inability to walk along the seashore without falling in, it has nevertheless been shown frequently and is surely likely to be accorded historical signifi cance as the beginning of the end for Kennedy, and perhaps even for his party. Kennedy’s style of politics simply lacked the confrontational power that strategies such as decapitation demanded. In terms of style – and much else besides – Ashdown’s was a hard act to follow, but Steel, Thorpe and Grimond each had a charismatic leadership quality that Kennedy lacked. His supporters argued that more had been achieved under Kennedy than under any of those charismatic leaders, but it would be argued that he had the opportunity to achieve the real breakthrough that they could only dream about. It is unarguable that since the Liberal revival of the early 1960s, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats have gained votes largely at the expense of the Conservatives. In 2005, under Kennedy, they gained votes in signifi cant The Green Shoots of a Conservative Revival? 7 numbers from Labour for the fi rst time. Ironically, however, they lost ground to the Conservatives, winning three seats from them and losing fi ve. Their trumpeted strategy of decapitation failed almost completely and indeed came back to haunt them when, in late 2005, moves were made within the party to challenge their own leader’s position. Their Conservative opponents were quick to point out that the only head of a leader likely to fall was Kennedy’s. And early in the New Year this was to prove to have been prophetic. It is true that the fi rst year after an election in which expectation has outstripped performance will always be diffi cult for party leaders, but the Liberal Democrats faced longer-term problems that, in many respects, were the consequences of their successes since 1992. In terms of MPs (and indeed MEPs and MSPs and Members of the Welsh Assembly) the party is bigger than at any time since the Lloyd George/Asquith break, and the political pressures that growth has generated have tended to be centrifugal rather than centripetal. Commentators have spoken of two camps competing for control of the party, the social liberals and economic liberals (in old currency this would have been left and right, but Liberal Democrats claim to have moved beyond such primitive distinctions). Only the decisive victory of one faction or the dominance of a leader who could unite both could prevent such a division causing lasting harm. This was a major justifi cation of the Kennedy leadership: his very lack of dynamism was conducive to an outward appearance of harmony. What was disheartening for those within the party who wished to replace Kennedy was the absence of any obvious contender for his position who was at the appropriate stage of his career and who enjoyed the necessary support within the party and public profi le. Deputy leader Sir Menzies Campbell possessed both qualities, but at nearly 65 his age told against him. Party President Simon Hughes, who had contested the leadership against Kennedy, was widely popular amongst the membership but had the support of fewer of the parliamentarians and was very easily identifi ed as a social liberal, and fi nally none of the younger, so-called modernisers had achieved a high enough public profi le seriously to challenge for the leadership. So, faute de mieux, Kennedy might have continued as leader in the interim, though if Cameron’s leadership of the Conservatives were to prove successful in turning round the fortunes of his party – inevitably at the expense of the Liberal Democrats – then the need for the party to be led decisively, effectively and in unison would have become paramount, and Kennedy’s position would again have come under threat. But history chose enforced suicide rather than the death of a thousand cuts for Kennedy’s demise. It became apparent in January 2006 that ITV was to broadcast a well-founded piece on Kennedy’s long-term drink problem and its consequences, and many of his leading colleagues called upon Kennedy to resign. In the event he chose a course of action that infuriated a number of his parliamentary colleagues: he publicly admitted to his problem (having previously denied it), claimed that it was behind him, and declared a leadership 8 Palgrave Review of British Politics 2005 election in which he proposed to stand (and no doubt to win). This proved too much for many senior fi gures in the party who let it be known that they would refuse to serve under him in such circumstances. In short, Kennedy had received the visit from the men in grey sandals. He had no option but to resign the next day. We need to be clear about the motivation of Kennedy’s colleagues in all this: they did not act to punish their leader for having a drink problem, they acted because, in their judgement, his drink problem had caused him to fail in his duties time and again, and this failure was about to be made public. It goes without saying that personal ambition played a part in the way that leading fi gures in the party comported themselves, but evidence of the leader’s shortcomings was not invention. The key point to be made in this sorry debacle is that Kennedy’s departure solves none of the longer- term problems, which have been exacerbated by the apparent rejuvenation of the Conservative Party. Their opponents have always criticised the Liberal Democrats for being all things to all people, but if the party aspires to become a permanent player in a three-party system, in which each party competes for the centre ground, it is essential that the party unites behind a strong leader with a clear set of policy objectives that give it a distinct identity. The party moved towards an election, with Campbell, Hughes, and the former MEP, Chris Huhne, as candidates. Unless Huhne could use the publicity generated by the campaign to emerge, Cameron-like, from comparative obscurity, the battle was bound to be between Campbell and Hughes. In the event the party plumped for Campbell. Success in the near future is less likely to come as a consequence of the failure of the Conservatives, as it certainly has in the past, and the collapse of Labour under the leadership of Gordon Brown is equally unlikely, though if it happened a Liberal Democratic party led by Simon Hughes might be a benefi ciary. Of the three main parties, the Conservatives can take most satisfaction from 2005. It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the size of the task ahead of them even to reverse 15 years of Liberal gains at their expense, let alone to unseat Labour. Moreover, Cameron’s plans to modernise the Conservative Party might be so radical as to cause serious tensions within the party. His explicit rejection of Thatcherism – Norman Lamont told friends of the Conservative Party in Washington that they should think of Cameron as a pre-Thatcher Conservative, especially a Macmillan – has already earned a strong rebuff from Lord Tebbit in the Sunday Telegraph. And no wonder: after all, Macmillan was not simply pre-Thatcher, he was anti-Thatcher. On the other hand, if Brown’s management of sustained growth falters signifi cantly and if Blair’s programme of public sector reforms continues to divide Labour and if the leadership change-over is mishandled, then perhaps the party that Brown fi nally inherits might face the ensuing election in a worse position than any it had faced since 1987, and if Cameron is able to sustain a lead in the polls coming up to that election, then anything is possible. The Green Shoots of a Conservative Revival? 9

Blair: seeking a legacy

I said at the outset that 2005 was not dominated by the general election. The London bombings were the most memorable feature of the political calendar, yet even they were seen by most people in Britain not so much as part of the war against terrorism as a consequence of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war. In refuting this connection, the government appeared to be in denial of a very conspicuous reality. The terrorists were British and by all accounts young men who, until the Iraq invasion, appeared well-integrated into British society. Their hostility, it seemed, was not instinctively to the West but specifi cally to the government’s invasion, though their unforgivable response was to attack ordinary people in London and not government or military institutions or personnel. As we have seen, the government’s response, in the form of the Terrorism Bill was considered by the majority of parliamentarians and those concerned with individual liberties to have been exaggerated. It is also worth pointing out when the Home Secretary invited senior police offi cers to support his proposal for 90-day detention, this was thought to be not just constitutionally improper but also unconvincing. Even in something as crucial as this piece of legislation, the government was simply not believed. In The Politics of Lying by The Spectator’s Peter Oborne, the author refers to what he calls the exponential rise in the use of the political lie under the present government, and he wonders whether a point has not already been reached at which the public simply does not believe what its government says. Whilst this may represent a cynicism that many Europeans would regard as normal and even healthy, Oborne’s point is that it is relatively new to British politics. In respect of the case in point, conspiracy theorists wondered whether Blair’s determination not to compromise on the 90-day issue was not an inexplicable miscalculation on the outcome at all, nor indeed a vain attempt to pursue the issue as a matter of principle, but rather a tactic to be brought into use at the next terrorist atrocity, to indicate how Blair’s opponents had tied his hands when he had attempted to prevent more atrocities, and thereby to gain political advantage. That such theories have any currency at all is a sad refl ection on the way the government is generally perceived. Bearing this in mind, it seems almost unbelievable that Blair’s overarching strategy for 2006, based upon his assessment of the public’s response to his general election campaign, was to restore ‘respect’ to British public life – principally by legislation. Blair might refl ect to advantage on Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to promote family values, when, fatefully, she entrusted leadership of the campaign to Cecil Parkinson, father of an illegitimate child by his former secretary, or John Major’s attempts to restore traditional values – his Back to Basics campaign – at a time when so many of his parliamentary colleagues were being forced to resign as a result of various forms of moral misconduct. The admonition ‘physician – heal thyself’ seems as appropriate to the Blair government’s campaign to restore respect as it was to these earlier 10 Palgrave Review of British Politics 2005 examples. But the government has also been responsible for sheer legislative ineptitude. It cannot have been the government’s intention, we assume, to prevent a young woman from reading out the names of those who had died in the Iraq war at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and yet she was indeed arrested under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. It cannot have been the government’s intention to have an 82-year-old party activist ejected from the Labour Party conference hall at Blackpool for mildly heckling the Foreign Secretary and then to use the provisions of the Terrorism Act to search him and prevent him from re-entering the hall. But Sue Prince shows how both events happened. The outlawing of the act of ‘encouraging terrorism’, she goes on, will prove diffi cult in the extreme to implement – could Cherie Blair have been charged, for example, for expressing her understanding of the position of Palestinian suicide bombers in 2002? The government announced at the beginning of 2006 that it would allow a free vote on its proposed limited ban on smoking in public places, thereby making a total ban (as in Scotland) far more likely. The bill that the government had itself proposed, exempting clubs and pubs that served food, would have proved as diffi cult to police as has the act banning fox hunting. Here the government has extricated itself from an unpleasant hook, but we wonder what kind of hooks it might yet impale itself on if, as seems likely, it is forced to compromise on its package of radical education reform. The Prime Minister, so the media inform us, wishes to entrench his political legacy before retiring. Internationally, the Iraq war and its aftermath will be his main legacy, and the chances of this being a positive one, whilst not zero, are very low. As President of the European Union, Blair spelled out a programme of reform to his partners, much of it sensible and well-received, but he proved able to initiate none of it. Tim Bale speaks of the poison that European issues injects into British politics from time to time, but the whole debate over Britain’s rebate proved to be an example of British issues injecting poison into European politics. And, however justifi ed the surrender of part of the rebate might have been, Blair had given an absolute assurance that nothing would be given away. As EU President, Blair proved unable to move his European partners to reduce agricultural tariffs and subsidies so as to allow the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, some leverage to try to negotiate a satisfactory outcome to the WTO talks in Hong Kong. This would have been a legacy of which he could justly have been proud, but it proved impossible. The meeting of the G8 at Gleneagles under his chairmanship offered Blair another opportunity to create a legacy and, although some gains were made, there was no breakthrough on the key issue of ‘fair trade’. In short, nothing in 2005 affected Blair’s legacy as much as the festering sore of Iraq. It is worth remembering that although the Suez affair ceased to be an issue in British politics more quickly than would have seemed possible, it remained as Eden’s legacy for ever. As for Blair’s legacy in domestic politics, The Green Shoots of a Conservative Revival? 11

2005 saw only, or at least chiefl y, the continued enthronement of spin and, to say the least, obfuscation. There is another perspective to the Blair legacy, which is as much a testimony to the limitations of legislation as to any defi ciency on the government’s part in creating particular pieces of legislation: the failure to transform the public sector. Initiatives, targets and (to be fair) extra resources have been thrown at services like education and the NHS but without obvious results. In January 2006, for example, something like one secondary school in fi ve was having grave problems in securing a head teacher to replace the incumbent. The job has become so hugely bureaucratic and relatively poorly paid as to be undesirable. The number of secondary schools said to be failing was considered to be unacceptably high and the government’s response, on advice, was to cut from two years to one the time available to new heads to raise their school to an acceptable level. It is hard to imagine anything less conducive to attracting new head teachers. But how is failure to be eradicated through legislation? Moreover, numeracy and literacy levels have not improved as hoped and even more radical changes, based upon the extension of parental choice, are planned. Health and education seem to be subject to a version of Maoist continuous revolution. The extension of choice in health, too, appears to be taken as a kind of panacea. There are, however, major theoretical objections to the extension of choice into areas of fi nite public goods, and hosts of practical objections exist to the general application of essentially metropolitan models of delivery. Most citizens, opponents of reform argue, look to the provision of quality local services, not to choice. But Michael Portillo has argued that, anyway, the radical transformations that Blair seeks may simply be beyond governments’ capacity to enforce these days, so that even when a government tries to do the ‘right’ things it is likely to fail. Philip Norton analyses the effects of the Freedom of Information Act, for example, showing what little impact it made on uncovering the details of recent events, and he notes especially the exceptional dilatoriness of the Home Offi ce. Sir Humphrey Appleby, anxious to cool the reforming zeal of his young minister, once pointed out that you can have government or you can have open; you can’t have open government. One element of Blair’s legacy that has changed Britain for ever is devolution, but little of immediate signifi cance happened in Scotland and Wales during 2005. In Northern Ireland, however, there were developments of apparently great importance: just as terrorists were again stalking the streets of London, in July, the IRA announced a fi nal end to its armed campaign. In September, it went even further. In what Taioseach Bertie Ahern called a landmark development, the IRA destroyed its arms, and John de Chastelain, head of the decommissioning body, declared: ‘We are satisfi ed that the arms decommissioned represents the totality of the IRA arsenal.’ Subsequent events in the province, however, showed that the reinstatement of devolved powers was no nearer. The defeat of David Trimble in the May general election 12 Palgrave Review of British Politics 2005 had constituted another kind of landmark – on the road away from what might be called constructive unionism, and Paisley’s DUP claimed to be unconvinced by decommissioning alone. At the end of 2005, power-sharing in a devolved system seemed no nearer and the DUP has made it plain that sharing power with a movement that openly seeks to bring down the state, even if through the ballot box, is not a prospect that interests it. In Northern Ireland, then, that hand of history that Blair felt on his shoulder after the Good Friday Agreement has yet to deliver him the permanent legacy he would have cherished. Whether his colleagues will be prepared to wait for Blair to feel that he has amassed a suffi cient legacy is another question that was much debated in 2005. The relationship between Blair and Brown has provided a source of gossip and speculation for many years and commentators have tended to divide between those who think that Brown simply lacks the ruthlessness to oust Blair and those who believe that an open, or anyway direct, attack upon Blair would be so divisive as to deliver only a Pyrrhic victory. The Australian Labor Party found itself in a similar position when party leader and Prime Minister Hawke was confronted with a challenge from his Finance Minister, Paul Keating, to the effect that they had made a pact concerning the transfer of leadership. Keating argued that Hawke was reneging on the pact. In this case, though, there existed some (not entirely convincing) third-party corroboration of the pact, and eventually – and grudgingly – Hawke gave way. However, it is worth bearing in mind that when he became party leader, Blair spent a considerable amount of time with Keating trying to uncover the key to Labor’s success in Australia. He might also have uncovered some helpful secrets about pact-making. It is not diffi cult to see similar dynamics in operation in the two cases, however. Though their relationship was often poisonous, Hawke needed the full support of Keating, who had been a success as a Finance Minister. In the 2005 election Blair palpably sought the visible support of his Chancellor (who, so we were informed, had earlier been relieved of any responsibility for campaign strategy) and indeed one of the most telling photo shots of the campaign was of Blair buying (or anyway acquiring) an ice cream for his Chancellor – the best of chums. But Brown and his supporters will not wait for ever and if the government is generally perceived to be failing badly then he will have to act decisively. At the back of his mind, Brown must surely have been harbouring, throughout 2005, misgivings that the legacy Blair will bequeath will be a broken party doomed to electoral defeat. The prospect of Brown confronting Cameron across the dispatch box is an intriguing one and, to some extent at least, it invites the prospect of comparison with an earlier duel: that between Gladstone and Disraeli, the one staid, conventional, experienced in government, sombre, who wore his morality on his sleeve, and the other unconventional, not so experienced, but decisive, colourful and quick-witted. Like their predecessors, a Brown and a Cameron who were masters of their own houses would be distinguishable as much The Green Shoots of a Conservative Revival? 13 by their demeanour and political style as by their very different ideological predispositions. And they too could turn out to be equally matched.

The predictable and the unexpected

I began by stating that politics in the United Kingdom was not dominated in 2005 by the general election but rather by the continuing loss of prestige and effectiveness of the Labour government, and as the year drew to a close, by the dramatic emergence on the political stage of a Conservative leader who looked capable of changing the fortunes of his party, and by the equally dramatic eclipse of the political career of the much admired Liberal Democratic leader, Charles Kennedy. The eruption of terrorism onto the streets and subways of London in July, shattering the lives of so many, knocked party politics and everything else off centre-stage briefl y. We must hope that this proves to be an isolated event and not any indication of the shape of things to come. These observations having been made, visitors to these shores in the year 2005 would have had their attention drawn by the British (or at least English) media to one series of events above any other: the wresting of supremacy in international cricket from the hands of the touring Australians. The regaining of the Ashes for the fi rst time in nearly 20 years, in a titanic struggle that was as noted for its sportsmanship as for its nail-biting closeness, took a whole summer. For a great number of people this will be the abiding memory of 2005.

Notes

1. Stephen Ingle, ‘Overview: A Wilderness Year’ in ‘UK 2004: Someone’s Responsible; No One’s to Blame’, Parliamentary Affairs, 58 (2005), 199–214. 2. Labour ‘lost’ a further 11 seats because of the reduction in the number of Scottish constituencies from 72 to 59. It had already lost another two seats to the Liberal Democrats, although one was regained at the general election.