ON SEPTEMBER 12, BRITAIN’S CONSERVATIVE PARTY will tally 330,000 mail-in votes for party leader. At that point it will bestow upon either (a) the centrist former chancellor of the exchequer Kenneth Clarke or (b) the hard-line Thatcherite shadow defense minister Iain Duncan Smith what increasingly looks like the trickiest job in Western politics. A little more than a decade after they ousted Margaret Thatcher as their party leader and prime minister, Britain’s Tories really ought to be riding high. The syllogism is simple: The big issue in British politics for the foreseeable future is whether Britain should enter the European Monetary Union, abandoning the pound sterling for the Euro. The British people, in the main, hate this idea, and the Tories are the party that agrees with them. Ergo, Conservatives should win. But they don’t. When Tory leader William Hague chose to contest the June 7 parliamentary elections on a “Save the Pound” theme, he thought he was hitting Labour prime minister Tony Blair at his weak point. Blair is petrified of the Euro referendum he has promised, and can’t even get his own chancellor of the exchequer to see eye to eye with him on the need to scrap the pound. What’s more, Blair was running at the nadir of his premiership, reeling from the disaster of hoof-and-mouth disease, and facing persistent public complaints about both a deteriorating national health service and a partially privatized rail system that is going from inconvenient to dangerous. Yet Hague and the Tories got clobbered for the second consecutive election. They picked up one seat at Westminster, true, but that still left them with only 166 of 659 parliamentary seats. In broad sections of the country, they are the third party, behind the once-centrist Liberal Democrats, who are now running quite consistently to the left of Labour. In huge swaths of Britain, the Conservative party is extinct. It holds one seat in Scotland, none in Wales. In neither 1997 nor 2001 did a Tory win a single seat in any city or large town outside of London. On the day after this spring’s elections, Hague, of course, resigned. So the Tories are now halfway through an exercise they hope will rescue them from the cruelest kind of political illogic. Their position is roughly the equivalent of what Republicans went through in the Gingrich years—a message that was a magic bullet half a decade before turning into an albatross—except that the albatross phase is going on forever. They’re using what is, in effect, the first primary election in party history to choose a leader and turn the party around. The process is novel: First the party’s parliamentary caucus picks two candidates, then party members nationwide choose between them. The result of a rules change in 1997, this innovation is the biggest part of William Hague’s legacy, and, like much of the rest of that legacy, it turns out to have been a catastrophic mistake. Hague’s rationale was that the Tories’ scanty 165-seat delegation was evidence the country didn’t think the Tories were listening. But his solution, as any observer of the U.S. primary system could have warned, was a recipe for radicalism. Put simply, it takes a party whose biggest problem is that it cannot attract voters outside of its shrinking base, and puts the choice of its leader in the hands of the 300,000 people in England who can be guaranteed to vote for it no matter what. After two other candidates were discarded, Tory members of Parliament had Clarke, Duncan Smith, and Michael Portillo as potential political merchandise to offer the public, and held a vote to pick two of them. Portillo, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, added this spring’s campaign to a spectacular lifelong string of bad luck and misjudgment. The odds-on favorite, Portillo had been the Tories’ ablest and most imaginative Thatcherite since the 1980s. He had been the last major figure to stand with Thatcher herself during the successful party revolt against her in 1990. But he would never get credit for loyalty—the cardinal Tory virtue—because five years later he was found out to have secretly bid for the party leadership when Thatcher’s successor John Major was still out campaigning. (Nor would he get any loyalty back from Thatcher this time around: For him, the great catastrophe of this spring’s race came when the conservative Sunday Telegraph ran a report that Portillo would get Thatcher’s endorsement and she quickly and indignantly denied it.) The one moment when the party leadership would have been Portillo’s for the taking was after Major’s defeat in 1997. That year, however, he narrowly lost his seat. In his time out of politics, he changed. He admitted having experimented with homosexuality as a young man, and after that the tabloids wouldn’t leave him alone. He was hounded about reform of the marijuana laws (which he supports) and about gay rights and gay marriage (which he supports, too). Three days after declaring his candidacy in June, he was asked on a morning show whether he’d had gay sex since his marriage in 1982. The Daily Mail made much of his love of opera. And Portillo changed in the process. While he hewed to the party’s small-government and anti-Europe lines, he began to lash out at Tory “extremes,” and to say the party must “adapt or die.” He even floated the idea of party-imposed quotas to get more women and minorities on candidate lists. So Portillo got the worst of both worlds. He was seen as a fire-breathing right-winger in the country at large, and as a flighty poof among the party’s core of hard-liners. The Guardian columnist Hugo Young noticed that the historically brash Portillo was beginning to look like “a troubled man, who seems to be using the party to discover his identity.” When the parliamentary vote came through, Portillo was the shocking loser, with just 53 votes to Clarke’s 59 and Duncan Smith’s 54. Portillo announced his retirement from front-bench politics. That may be a big problem, because in Duncan Smith and Clarke, the Tories have chosen candidates from the far right and left of their party, and set the stage for a battle so ideological that the influential conservative columnist Peter Oborne warned (no—promised) after Portillo’s defeat that this summer the Tory party will break apart. The Scot Duncan Smith can be thought of as the Goldwater of the race. His preeminent goal is to keep the lines between Tory ideology and Labour ideology sharply drawn. Son of a World War II flying ace, he served in Ireland (and Rhodesia) himself. He’d bring back hanging. He has never had a cabinet-level position—he refused one in order to attack the Major government on the Maastricht treaties, which brought closer integration among the European Union countries. He doesn’t just say “no” to the Euro; he says “never.” And his anti-Europeanism has a decidedly Atlanticist bent. He has approached Phil Gramm about Britain’s joining NAFTA. After the Nice accords laid the groundwork for a Europe-only “rapid reaction force,” Duncan Smith came to Washington to warn the Bush administration that Blair was lying when he said that such a force would not undermine NATO. (To avoid caricature, it should also be noted that Duncan Smith went to university in Perugia and has been on the dole twice.) If Duncan Smith is Britain’s Goldwater, Clarke is its John McCain. He is all affability: He’s pot-bellied, drinks a lot of beer, and smokes a lot of cigars. He even delayed announcing his candidacy until he returned from “flogging fags” to the Vietnamese, in his capacity as deputy chairman of British American Tobacco. He has built a long career as a real conservative—he sold Thatcher’s National Health Service reforms as health secretary in the late 1980s, and her teaching reforms as education secretary in the early 1990s. He even challenged Hague in 1997 with the help of arch-conservative John Redwood. And in a way, he remains a conservative—the only deep change he’s asked for is the Euro. But that’s change enough. Like McCain with campaign-finance reform, Clarke has pursued his obsession to the point of embracing his partisan foes. He even appeared with Tony Blair to promote monetary union. This has left him beloved in the country at large and despised by somewhere around half of his fellow Tories. So conservatives are faced with a choice between Clarke’s Europhilia and Duncan Smith’s obduracy. Clarke is now moving rightwards by promising to appoint a Euroskeptic cabinet, and says that Duncan Smith stands no chance of ever winning an election. Duncan Smith is now moving leftwards by promising a host of green initiatives, and says that Clarke stands no chance of holding the party together. Tory voters are beginning to get the sinking feeling that both candidates are right. Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
