Snubbing the Tories

The trouble is that the party that has produced ideological icons for American conservatives from the Duke of Wellington to Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher, has been cold-shouldered by the Bush White House. And all because of Iraq.

Michael Howard, the Conservative leader since late last year, has been trying to schedule a brief visit to the White House. Such photo-ops are customarily accorded leaders of the Opposition, even Neil Kinnock, the left wing Labour leader who lost two general elections, got the honor from Ronald Reagan.

But earlier this year, Howard was told in fairly blunt terms by Karl Rove that he was not going to get his ticket to the Oval office. “You can forget about meeting the president full stop,” Rove was reported by the Sun newspaper last weekend as saying. “Don’t bother coming , you are not meeting him.” According to the Sun, the White House was furious that Howard had attacked Tony Blair, their staunch ally, over Iraq, calling on the prime minister to resign over his conduct.

It is impossible not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Britain’s top Tory. There are few greater Americophiles in the House of Commons. As Home secretary in the last Conservative government, he eagerly emulated innovative anti-crime measures pioneered in American cities. As shadow chancellor of the Exchequer for the last few years, he liked nothing better than to sit at the feet of Alan Greenspan while the Great One explained the benefits of American capitalism. An avid baseball fan, he is probably one of only a handful of MPS who could tell you what “RBI” stands for.

So the Rove snub has been greeted with indignation by some of the Tories’ friends. In two identically-titled op-eds in Wednesday’s press “Why snub the Tories?”, Peter Stothard, a former editor of the London Times, and Anne Applebaum, in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post respectively, chided the Bushies for behaving like petulant teenagers.

It is true that the Tories have a lot more in common with the Republican party than Labour. Bush’s sometimes overly personal approach to diplomacy might occasionally lead to political misjudgments. Bush is, viscerally, hated by about 80 percent of the Labour party and at least half of Tony Blair’s cabinet, most of whose members offer nightly prayers for a John Kerry victory in November.

Even so, the Bushies surely have a point.

Trailing in British public opinion polls, Howard has been behaving in ways that look at best cynical, at worst, Kerryesque. When the House of Commons voted to authorize the Iraq war in March 2003, the then Tory number two was an enthusiastic backer. As the British public soured on the war in the ensuing months, Howard backpedaled furiously.

When a storm erupted over whether Blair misused intelligence on Iraqi WMDs to justify the war, Howard went into overdrive, accusing the prime minister (and by implication, the president) of lying.

When Blair was cleared of the charge of lying by no fewer than four inquiries, Howard refused to back down, and instead switched tactics, telling a British newspaper in July that if he had known then what he knows now he would not have voted for the use of force. He quickly went on to say, however, that he still thought the war was justified. Sound familiar? John Kerry couldn’t have put it better.

The truth is the Tories have been opportunists about Iraq. They backed the war and lauded the efforts of British and American troops when it was going well, but since then have exploited every opportunity to undermine Bush’s and Blair’s defense of the war.

And there was something slightly unsettling about the way the Tories handled the Bush snub story. Howard seemed only too pleased to confirm it and issue a somber and courageous warning that no foreign power would stop him telling the truth.

“A Conservative government would work very closely with President Bush or President Kerry, but my job as leader of the opposition is to say things as I see them in the interests of our country and to hold our government to account, ” he said this week. “If some people in the White House, in their desire to protect Mr. Blair, think I am too tough on Mr. Blair or too critical of him, they are entitled to their opinion. But I shall continue to do my job as I see fit.”

All this raises the natural suspicion that the Tories may be stooping to an even deeper cynicism–that Howard is actually trying to shore up his own party’s flagging prospects by trading on anti-Bush sentiment in Britain.

Not the kind of thing Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher would have done.

Gerard Baker is U.S. Editor of the London Times and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.