How the ousting of Margaret Thatcher poisoned and brutalised the Conservative Party.
'Regicide: The Killing Of A King'.
On 22nd November 1990 Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister. She had won three successive General Elections for the Conservative Party and had transformed the terms of national debate. But ten-and-a-half years after she had entered 10 Downing Street she was ousted by her own MPs. Those MPs had watched the Labour opposition build up a double digit opinion poll lead and they hoped that a different leader would save their seats.
They eventually chose John Major - Spitting Image’s Grey Man - to succeed the Iron Lady and the 1992 General Election victory appeared to vindicate their decision. Others have argued that Mrs Thatcher could have defeated Neil Kinnock if she had been given the chance. We will never know. Others, taking a different tack, have suggested that 1992 was ‘an election to lose’ and the party would have been better keeping Mrs T and being defeated. That way Tories would have avoided responsibility for Wednesday 16th September 1992 - the day Britain crashed out of the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the Tory reputation for economic competence was blasted to smithereens. If Neil Kinnock had won in 1992 he would have had to deal with the ‘ERM fallout’ and, perhaps, it would have been a Tory landslide in 1997 and a Euro-sceptic Prime Minister Michael Portillo... Perhaps… Perhaps… Perhaps…
There are many ‘what if’ questions raised by the events of November 1990 but one thing is certain. The ‘1990 Regicide’ injected a poison into the body politic of Britain’s Conservative Party. If Tory MPs felt able to oust such an accomplished figure as Mrs T they wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of humbler creatures.
The Messiah complex
The leaderships of John Major, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith were all dogged by leadership speculation. Changing the leader has come to be seen as a quick fix and just one manifestation of today’s personality politics. Michael Gove has said the Tories suffer from a "Messiah complex". They believe that all their unpopularity will vanish if only the right leader can be found.
A good leader is, of course, important but Britain, despite Tony Blair’s tendencies, has a parliamentary – not a presidential – political system. A good leader cannot compensate for an otherwise inadequate or unleadable parliamentary team. He needs a grassroots campaigning organisation and a rejuvenated conservative infrastructure. A party needs a governing philosophy that can make it more than a personality cult.
The nasty party
The other, connected legacy of November 1990 is the Tory Party’s reputation for nastiness. Kitten-heeled Theresa May got into terrible trouble when she told the 2002 Tory Conference that it had been perceived as the “nasty party”. She was wrong if she meant the grassroots. Tory constituency activists are at the compassionate heart of most communities. The nasty ones are the MPs who took money from tycoons for asking parliamentary questions and who lie about their voting intentions during every leadership election.
In 2003 Tory MPs no-confidenced Iain Duncan Smith after his wife, Betsy, had been accused of misusing parliamentary funds. The Betsygate inquiry exonerated the Duncan Smiths but the damage had been done and two of BDS’s accusers became Tory parliamentary candidates.
One floating voter told IDS' Director of Communications: “If That’s What You Do To Your Own What Will You Do To The Rest Of Us?”
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